Author: Wojciech Kluz

C# Traps and Traps – part 2

Wojciech Kluz/ / Uncategorised

Theory vs practice.

One of the first conclusions from learning about memory, data structures and collections was that we should always choose the collection according to our usage. The next step was to learn about all the collections so we could make an informed decision while writing our code.

An array is a collection that takes uninterrupted space in memory – and thanks to that, if we know where the first element of an array is in the memory, we can compute where the n-th element is – we just have to add n multiplied by the size of the element to the first element address and as a result, we know the address of the n-th element. The problem with an array is that when we need to expand the array (add new elements) we have to find a new place in the memory that will fit the array (including new elements), copy the memory to the new address, change the pointer to the memory and then free the old memory. The details differ between implementations but it is generally a lot of work.

Linked list, on the other hand, is great if we don’t need to have fast access to the n-th element, but we would like to add a lot of elements to the collection. A linked list does not take uninterrupted memory block, but instead, every element of the collection has knowledge of where the next (and sometimes previous) element is. This way, knowing the first element, you can get the address to next one, from there the next one and so on. When you need to access an n-th element of the Linked List it is difficult, because we need to visit n elements to finally find n-th. But it is super easy to add new elements to this collection, the only thing we need to do is to modify the previous element of the collection so that it points to the new element and makes the new element point to next element of the array. No need to copy memory, we just change pointers. Neat.

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C# Traps and Traps

Wojciech Kluz/ / Technology, Tutorial

Recently, on behalf of my employer, I spoke at the IT Academics Day, a small .NET conference organized by the West Pomeranian University of Technology. Together with Mateusz, we have presented some of the traps that a C# developer might encounter and how to recover from those. I would like to share three of ten such traps in today’s blog post, the rest will follow.

When inheritance is dangerous

The first one is a dangerous design trap, a bomb with a long fuse. Let’s take a look at the following code:

internal class BaseData
{
   protected string data = null;

   public BaseData(string data)
   {
       this.data = data;
       this.InitializeState();

       Console.WriteLine("BaseData created");
   }

   public virtual void InitializeState()
   {
       // Some basic initialization logic.
   }
}

Do you see anything dangerous yet?

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Introduction to Entity Framework Core

Wojciech Kluz/ / Technology

What is Entity Framework?

For those who never stumbled upon Entity Framework, it is Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework. Its main purpose is to provide an abstraction of a database, so you can use the database as if using normal in-memory data collections.

In practice, you still need to be mindful of what you do write your LINQ upon, especially time-wise. However, the simplicity of building a database-powered persistence is stunning and, in my opinion, worth investing your time required for learning this framework.

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Introduction

Wojciech Kluz/ / Slice of life, Status update, Technology

The goals of this blog.

Once in a while, an engineer reflects on his or her career and ask the question: what next? The honest answer could guide our professional development for next few years that follow. I, together with my friends, answered that question in a similar fashion, so we have formed a team.

Some of us are professional developers, some are scientists and some are at the doorstep of a programmer career. Although we have different backgrounds, we have discovered that we share the same goals.

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