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 …

Blurry Text with Small Fonts in WPF

Introduction The difficulties with text rendering in WPF have been well documented elsewhere.  However, every time I get a blurry button I can't remember how to fix it.  This brief post shows the usual solutions. TextOptions.TextFormattingMode With small font sizes the default WPF text rendering can lead to text looking very blurry.  This is particularly …

Review of a Trading System Project

Introduction In late 2007 I wrote a series of articles on Microsoft’s Composite Application Block (CAB).  At that time I was running a team that was developing a user interface framework that used the CAB. We’re now four years on and that framework is widely used throughout our department.  There are currently modules from eleven …

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: A Comparison of Some Dependency Injection Frameworks

Part 1 Introduction and Motivation A discussion of the motivation behind looking at a number of dependency injection frameworks, and which ones we will look at. Part 2 Scenarios To Be Tested A description of the various tests to be run on the dependency injection frameworks. Part 3 Spring with XML Configuration (Java) A detailed look at running the tests …

A Comparison of Some Dependency Injection Frameworks: Part 4 Spring.Net with XML Configuration (.Net)

Introduction Parts 1 to 3 of this series of articles outlined a series of tests we will be running on various dependency injection frameworks.  Part 3 looked at how we would run these tests in Spring for Java using XML configuration. This article will very briefly look at the same tests being run in Spring.Net. …

A Comparison of Some Dependency Injection Frameworks: Part 2 Scenarios To Be Tested

Introduction Part one of this series of articles discussed a set of dependency injection frameworks that we will be examining, and also the motivation behind this. This article describes the tests we will be performing and how they will be constructed in code. The Scenarios Tested The following dependency injection scenarios will be tested: Configuration …