Connecting to Tibco EMS from a C# Client

Introduction This is a slightly esoteric post, but hopefully it will be of use somewhere.  Below is some reasonably simple code that shows the basic use cases for connecting to a Tibco EMS Server topic from a C# client using Tibco's TIBCO.EMS.dll. It actually points at a locally installed instance of EMS.  That is, the …

Asynchronous Programming in .Net: Async and Await for Beginners

Introduction There are several ways of doing asynchronous programming in .Net.  Visual Studio 2012 introduces a new approach using the 'await' and 'async' keywords.  These tell the compiler to construct task continuations in quite an unusual way. I found them quite difficult to understand using the Microsoft documentation, which annoyingly keeps saying how easy they …

Why Starting a New Task in the Task Parallel Library (TPL) Doesn’t Always Start a New Thread

The Task Parallel Library in .Net is a wonderful resource.  However, one thing that is a little confusing is that it is actually possible to start a task that runs on the same thread as the current code.  That is, we can do Task.StartNew and it still runs on the same thread.  This isn't the …

Delegate Syntax in C# for Beginners

Introduction I have been programming with C# since it came out but I still find the delegate syntax confusing.  This is at least partially because Microsoft have changed the recommended syntax regularly over the years.  This article is a quick recap of the various syntaxes.  It also looks at some of the issues with using …

Closures in C#

Introduction There seems to be some confusion about closures in C#: people are mystified as to what they are and there’s even an implication that they don’t work the way you’d expect. As this short article will explain they are actually quite simple, and do work the way you’d expect if you’re an object oriented …

Table of Contents: Introduction to using Financial Products Markup Language (FpML) with Microsoft .NET Tools

Part 1 Introduction An overview of how we can use Visual Studio to examine the FpML XSDs. Shows how to create a Visual Studio project containing the FpML schemas, and how to use that to navigate through them. Also shows how to validate the XML examples that are provided in the FpML download, both using …

A Beginner’s Guide to calling a .NET Framework Library from Excel

Introduction It’s fairly straightforward to call a .NET Framework library directly from Excel on Windows, particularly if you are using Visual Studio.  You don’t need Visual Studio Tools for Office.  However there doesn’t seem to be an easy guide on the internet anywhere. The Microsoft documentation is quite good on the subject, but can be …