Vadmyst's Life Chronicles

Howto: C++ Class Conversion Operator in .CPP file

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:53:01 PDT

In case someone did not know how to do this. It took me some time to figure out the right syntax for writing conversion operator implementation in the CPP file. Here is the definition of the...

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Complex Keys In Generic Dictionary

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:09:36 PDT

Let us start with the quiz about generic dictionary. Dictionary simpleDict = new Dictionary(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); simpleDict["name1"] = "value"; simpleDict["Name1"] = "value2";What value...

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Check If Local Port Is Available For TCP Socket

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:35:30 PDT

From time to time we need to check if specified port is not occupied. It can be some sort of setup action where we install server product and want to assure that tcp listener will start without any...

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Discovering System Endianess

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:20:24 PDT

When doing network programming we send bytes to and from peers. These bytes sometimes constitute complex protocols. Let us assume we have simple message exchange protocol with some header and some...

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Windows Vista Defragmentation Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:51:04 PDT

Windows Vista by default uses NTFS file system. Sooner or later files on it will start to fragment. Fragmentation can lead to significant disk I/O performance decrease. Common way how to handle...

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Image Watermarking

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:14:37 PDT

We all know that when image is posted on the internet it no longer belongs to you. It can be arguable, but nevertheless, any user with browser can simply save it on HDD and you can do nothing about...

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Searching for Similar Words. Similarity Metric

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:16:51 PST

How one can find out if two or more words are similar? I do not mean semantically similar (synonyms aren't taken into consideration), but visually similar. Consider, these two words, "sample1" and...

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Bit Flags: The Simple Way

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 02:50:47 PST

Time from time we face the need or (for some of us) an opprotunity to mess with the bit fields. As we all know bytes consist of bits. Bit can have two values "0" and "1". Using this knowledge we can...

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Handling Windows Operating System Version Mess

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:27:21 PDT

Operating System (OS) like any other software should have a version. So do new OSes from Microsoft. Sometimes OS version is crucial for the installation software development process. Some products...

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"Using" magic or working with type aliases

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:26:00 PDT

Generics in C# allow us specify and construct rather complex types. For instance, we can create a dictionary that maps Id number with the name: Dictionary<int, string> idNameMapping;We can...

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The basics of secure data exchange under TCP

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:26:35 PDT

Doing data exchange in plain text is very convenient and easy to implement but what can you do to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery of the data you send back and forth? Here's...

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Hashing in .NET (cryptography related battle tactics)

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:55:28 PDT

Those who think I'm going to talk about stuff related to hashish or hash brown are totally not right. (By the way I do like hash brown as well as this great Japanese liquor ;) ) I will be talking...

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Seeking CSS Enlightenment

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:44:18 PDT

Nowadays it is hard to find software developer or web-designer that doesn't know what CSS is all about. I must say that until recently, I didn't realize what potential CSS has. I found a place in...

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Sample code for TCP server using completion ports

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:25:03 PDT

As I have promised in my previous post I'm presenting sample code of TCP server that is receiving variable length messages in specific format. Data transfer protocol implies that network messages...

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High peformance TCP server using completion ports

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:31:55 PDT

Completion ports were first introduced in Windows NT 4.0. This technology makes simultaneous asynchronous I/O possible and extremely effective. When building high performance network software one has...

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What is peeking in TCP and why should it be avoided

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:32:56 PDT

Typical network receive operation via sockets looks like this: socket.Receive(userBuffer, userBuffer.Length, SocketFlags.None); In the above code received data is moved from Winsock internal buffers...

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Change socket send and receive timeout

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:23:33 PDT

Sometimes synchronous Socket I/O methods like Send or Receive take too long to complete or produce an error (exception). This default behavior can be changed using socket options. Namely,...

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Proper way to close TCP socket

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:37:42 PDT

This question arises very often in the developers communities. For simplification I'll talk about synchronous sockets. Generally, the procedure is like this: Finish sending data Call...

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Part 2: How to Transfer Variable Length Messages With Async Sockets

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:48:43 PDT

In my previous post about transferring data in the async manner. I was talking about designing a small data exchange protocol to transfer a message over the network. All I/O was done in the async...

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How To Go Slow: Summing Arrays

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:35:39 PST

In this entry I'll talk about thrashing when iterating over complex arrays. Consider a square array with the size of N = 10000; Now, consider the code that summs elements of the square array for...

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When string.ToLower() is Evil

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:26:19 PST

Did you know how evil string.ToLower() can sometimes be? Let me explain... Very often I see code similar to this: void DoBadAction (string val) { if (val.ToLower() == "someValue") { //do...

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How to Transfer Fixed Sized Data With Async Sockets

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 05:26:37 PST

This post was inspired by the discussion in MDSN forums. Discussion on that forum showed that there is misunderstanding of the principles of data transfer across the network, especially in...

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Unmanaged Debugging Option Very Useful in Visual Studio .NET

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:27:35 PST

When developing managed code that is interacting with unmanaged world one has to be very careful, especially when working with unmanaged memory. Here's an example how critical memory bug can be...

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Effective SQL Mindset: Cursors VS Joins

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:28:12 PST

In the past I've dealt a lot with cursors. My experience was mostly negative. SQL code written using them was terribly slow. Thus our team was transforming SQL code with cursors into code without...

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Here Comes Another Bubble

noreply@blogger.com (Vadym Stetsiak) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:28:48 PST

Some people say that there won't be .com like bubble any more. However, there are signs out there that indicate the opposite :) Thanks Alena C++ for the link

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