The book startles out with the basics of parsing and even expressions and all that jazz. But the extent of the code is a bunch of screen shots. We are droping a line a parser/compiler dang it, we aren’t WYSIWYGing our way through life at this point, you have to render some existent frigin code. What you terminate up with is a bunch of screen shots of many tools for droping a line a compiler, but not truly the code, unless of course you proceed snap up the CD and come out all of the code without a lick of explanation from the book. God I go for the code is good documented with comments, or you simply bribed an issue of Compiler’s Instanced and this isn’t the Swimsuit edition. I’ll let in some of my ain links at the bottom, where I present factual code for many of these processes.

OK, so you pay off to meet a bunch of tools, and what do you pay back? Well, you produce a bunch of half-assed tools (good-for-naught for the language if your kid is learning my highly technical blog… In fact, if he/she is I could utilize some interns, must typewrite 50+ WPM and be technical at C, C++, or C#). A numerical expression evaluator is the first. I conceive it is ever the first. People e’er trivialize math. Thence make sure enough you view all the pretty pictures and render to harvest some wisdom from the text. I have a numerical expression evaluator by the way, it’s sent for calc.exe and from what I can assure it has shipped since 16-bit windows. He as well makes believe an attempt at a even expression workbench. You can’t have enough of those (really I’m not being sarcastic hither, I constantly apprize a newfangled regex tool), but and so he ne’er spells anything or manifests compiler technology that utilises veritable expressions. Does he come in NFA/DFA technology? Well, he does discuss it for a few sentences. BNF format? Over again a few sentences hither and in that location. But await, another tool is what you get under one’s skin and this time it is a picture of a drop-downward menu with all sorts of truly teasing names (convert from BNF to XML, exhibit a BNF parse tree, display arranged docs, etc…). At this point use one of the pages to get the drool doing off your lip, because that is as near as you’ll make it this book to anything nerveless.

OK, thus block the tools. At some point he really begins talking about existent compiler technology. I think around chapter 7 peradventure? I rattling should dig out up the TOC on Amazon, but I’m just moving to squander enough time on this book to eat up this posting. Anyhow, they start up discoursing the assorted parsing techniques. Recursive descent (RD), Top-Down, Bottom-Up… I imagine there are some other peculiar names they throw in in that location to pose the reader. After taking all of the major compiler design books I shouldn”t be mystified by something that could classify as a 4 Dummies book (unless it is something like Cross Dressing 4 Dummies, I could probably use that after my Halloween party)…  Anyway, they really donn’t do the entire process justice, and I think at some point some more tools are used, Yacc might be mentioned, and bam, back to the pictures.

At this point I want to identify the worst problem I found throughout the entire book. Plainly the author didn’t have time to eat up the code so they led a bunch of exercises for the reader. Nah, nah… You don”t leave the compiler as an exercise in a book on how to write a compiler. You leave behind bits and pieces, but not the of import stuff. Experiencing my Knuth books, I’m really stormed when he gos away problems as exercises that ask more know-how than what has been provided in the chapter. I don”t mind exercises for the reader, but there is a limit people. Ideate catching backward from Home Depot with a 300 page picture book on constructing a house, that had a bunch of pictures of finished homes, and some text offering up that the building of the house will be resulted as an exercise for the reader. Doh!

At the end of the book, it is ostensible I’m not starting to pay off anything of use and so it starts up talking about code generation. Oooh, something with some meat. In reality, they’ve been mentioning their nodes for the calculator in such a way that the name of the node was pretty often the name of the op code that was rifling to be named. They may have some Fast Introductory implementation code spits as comfortably, but I’m confused at this point (and graveled) because I’ve been fingering this book for an hour. In reality the act of spewing IL is in all likelihood deserving an intact book of it’s ain (oh waitress it is Deep down Microsoft.NET IL Assembler and you truly should buy this one so I catch 50 cents). That isn’t just because that book is really how IL functions and not how to spew it. But I’d remember one does predate the other since finally your runing to go out of node names to match to IL op-codes and when opComplexOperation isn’t mirrored by OpCodes.ComplexOperation I simply don”t know what you’ll do.

How fair of a review is this? Well, I’ve interpret factual compiler books, quite a few of them. I’ve carryed out my ain parsers and compilers many times for many unlike circumstances. I don”t think it is a hard process and I think extending the process to a more general development audience is important. There should be a relatively approachable book on droping a line your ain.NET languages, but this book is for sure not it. I’ll hold searching about, I take heed there is another book focalized on.NET language generation and I’ll have to look it out. Perhaps an O’Reilly publication? Can you catch an accurate review from something in about an hour’s time? Well, I register tight, the words were quite big, most of the content was entirely conversant and entirely about 30% of the page material was text, so I’d go for indeed. Get hold of this for what it is deserving, but if I learn any referral money for that book, I’ll cognise someone is runing low to be expressing joy hysterically when they catch that book in a 2-3 days from Amazon. PS: I didn’t and won”t buy the book. I passed a couple of hours at Borders today working through two books that got my eye when I was very seeking a with child.NET Localization book. I take to dig up up Michael Kaplan, since I’m certain he has saved something someplace.

Lexer/Parser/Compiler   Code and articles for unlike types of parsers
Lexer, Parser, Compiler, Oh My!   Postings, with code, on even more lexer/parser stuff
ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/dick/PTAPG/BookBody.pdf  A more tough-core text on parser technologies

Relating Posts:
CVS on the Web

Suppose you’re debugging your application and you realise that version 1.0 of an assembly is being charged when you intended it should be version 2.0. Where is the reference to 1.0 coming from?

The well-fixedest way to regain out is to view the Fusion log for this bind. If the version 1.0 assembly was successfully charged, utilize the ForceLog/”Log all binds” option of FusLogVw. And then, seek the line in the log demonstrating the addressing assembly:

Addressing assembly : referencingAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=achromatic, PublicKeyToken=12ab3bf24c56c45b.

It exhibits the display name of the addressing assembly when uncommitted. It doesn’t assure you whether this is a unchanging or a dynamical reference because Fusion doesn’t cognize or care (that doesn’t matter for obliging purposes). So, this could intend that referencingAssembly was built against the other 1.0 assembly, or that it invited it at runtime via Assembly.Load(), etc.

Sometimes the naming assembly is not specified in the log. There are a few potential cases where that bechances:

• The assembly was requested by unmanaged code (interop).
• The calling off assembly was in another appdomain (AppDomain.CreateInstance(), etc.).
• The calling off assembly had not been loaded through Fusion (Assembly.Load(byte[]), Assembly.LoadFile(), etc.).

Microsoft’s prescribed support website is http://support.microsoft.com/. It has all kinds of resources like product FAQs, downloads, searchable KB articles, newsgroup pointers, and ways to hit people to help with your single needs or feedback.

Alas, I can’t consecrate attention to single customer issues. That’s because I work in product design and development, not customer support. Someone has to be revolved about that, or else we’d ne’er embark anything! Then, I’m moving to have to entrust your questions and comments to MS’s prescribed channels which specialize in that. Please preserve comments you put up hither worldwide and about the loader or performance.

I just noticed that the good folks at Pixel8 posted a podcast I did with them a while back.  It was a fun conversation about a bit of.NET history as well as where we are going. 

Landing Page   Download show

I’d love the hear what you think!

Also see: Infrequent blogging

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/248013264/thread.tss

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If you’ve yet to be sold on the Internet, grab a seat and your favorite pointing device. My good man Ryan sent me a link to what is undoubtedly the Internet’s Killer App: The Beer Mapping Project

Chicago’s map is a bit limited — my neighborhood alone has over 450 bars — so get on it. It takes a village, comrades.

God Bless America!

http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2006/01/18/435889.aspx

Also see: Infrequent blogging

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/248003447/thread.tss

With a simple extension method to ControlCollection to flatten the control tree you can use LINQ to query the control tree:

public static class PageExtensions

{

 public static IEnumerable<Control> All(this ControlCollection controls)

 {

 foreach (Control control in controls)

 {

 foreach (Control grandChild in control.Controls.All())

 yield return grandChild;

 yield return control;

 }

 }

}

Now I can do things like this:

// get the first empty textbox

TextBox firstEmpty = accountDetails.Controls

.All()

.OfType<TextBox>()

.Where(tb => tb.Text.Trim().Length == 0)

.FirstOrDefault();

// and focus it

if (firstEmpty != null)

 firstEmpty.Focus();

Pretty cool! I can do all sorts of querying of the control tree now. LINQ you are my h

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ero.

I try to follow a coding standard for organizing my using statements. System.* goes at the top and then other namespaces grouped together like this:

 using System;
 using System.Collections.Generic;
 using System.Configuration;
 using System.Data;
 using System.Data.SqlClient;
 using System.Web;
 using System.Web.Script.Services;
 using System.Web.Services;
 using System.Web.Services.Protocols;

 using Microsoft;
 using Microsoft.CSharp;

 using MyCompany;
 using MyCompany.Web;

.csharpcode,.csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode.rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode.kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode.str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode.op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode.preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode.asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode.html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode.attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode.alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode.lnum { color: #606060; }

I finally got tired enough of keeping this all sorted out that I made a VS.NET macro to do it for me. This macro will take the current selection, parse it for using statements, group and sort them like the above example.

Also see: Mix 08 Sessions Published

Also see: VS.NET Macro To Group and Sort Your Using Statements

Here’s the macro code:

 Dim _usingPattern As Regex = New Regex( _
 "\s*(?<using>using\s*(?<group>\w+)[^;]*);", _
 RegexOptions.IgnoreCase _
 Or RegexOptions.Multiline _
 Or RegexOptions.ExplicitCapture _
 Or RegexOptions.CultureInvariant _
 Or RegexOptions.Compiled _
 )

 Public Sub SortUsing()
 If Not DTE.ActiveDocument Is Nothing Then
 Dim sel As TextSelection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection

 If sel.Text.Contains(vbCrLf) Then
 If sel.ActivePoint Is sel.BottomPoint Then sel.SwapAnchor()
 sel.StartOfLine(vsStartOfLineOptions.vsStartOfLineOptionsFirstColumn, True)
 sel.SwapAnchor()
 sel.EndOfLine(True)

 Dim groups As New SortedList(Of String, List(Of String))()
 For Each match As Match In _usingPattern.Matches(sel.Text)
 Dim u As String = match.Groups("using").Value
 Dim g As String = match.Groups("group").Value

 ' System usings sort at the top
 If g = "System" Then g = "_" + g

 Dim list As List(Of String)
 If Not groups.TryGetValue(g, list) Then
 list = New List(Of String)()
 groups.Add(g, list)
 End If
 list.Add(u)
 Next

 Dim builder As New StringBuilder()
 For Each group As KeyValuePair(Of String, List(Of String)) In groups
 If builder.Length > 0 Then builder.AppendLine()
 group.Value.Sort()
 For Each line As String In group.Value
 builder.Append(line)
 builder.AppendLine(";")
 Next
 Next

 sel.DeleteLeft()
 sel.Insert(builder.ToString())
 End If
 End If
 End Sub

.csharpcode,.csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode.rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode.kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode.str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode.op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode.preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode.asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode.html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode.attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode.alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode.lnum { color: #606060; }

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http://weblogs.asp.net/dfindley/archive/2007/02/07/vs-net-macro-to-group-and-sort-your-using-statements.aspx

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I recently ran into an issue with using Silverlight 2 on a production web server.   Basically the Silverlight 2 application worked great on my dev machine, but when hit from the production web server I found the page has the Silverlight control, but just a white canvas, nothing else.

The problem was that the web server was not set up to handle the.xap file extension that Silverlight 2 uses to encapsulate the code for the application. 

A few options for fixing this issue:

1. For IIS6, simply add the.XAP filetype.

2. For II7, this should just work as IIS7 enables them all by default.

3. Other web services such as Apache, lighttpd, etc.  Just make sure the server is configured to allow access to.xaml,.wmv and.xap files and you should be all set

4.  Sometimes you can’t easily go in and change the setting on the server.   So the solution I actually used was none of these.  I just renamed the.XAP file to.ZIP, changed the reference in my applications.Xaml file and it ran fine! 

Hope that helps!

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/14/using-silverlight-2-on-a-production-web-server.aspx