And quickly ran into problems.

For DNS TXT records, DnsQuery returns a DNS_TXT_DATA structure in the Data field of the DNS_RECORD structure. DNS_TXT_DATA is declared like this:

typedef struct {
    DWORD dwStringCount;
    PWSTR pStringArray[1];
} DNS_TXT_DATA,
    *PDNS_TXT_DATA;

Using the very handy P/Invoke Interop Assistant, we see that this struct can be represented like this in managed code:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
public struct DNS_TXT_DATA {
 
    /// DWORD->unsigned int
    public uint dwStringCount;
 
    /// PWSTR[1]
    [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray,
            SizeConst=1,
            ArraySubType=UnmanagedType.SysUInt)]
    public IntPtr[] pStringArray;
}

There is a problem with pStringArray, unfortunately. The System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal class cannot marshal a variable length array, as it needs to know in advance how big the array is in order to allocate memory. That’s why the managed structure needs SizeConst specified in the MarshalAs attribute.

However, if the DNS TXT record data contains multiple quoted strings separated by whitespace, DnsQuery will return a structure with a variable number of elements in pStringArray. Since SizeConst is set at compile-time, when we marshal this into the managed struct defined above, we only get the first element in our single-element array. Rats.

More googling turned up very little info on dealing with this, though I found indications that others had run into the same problem without finding a satisfactory conclusion. DnsQuery is not the only Win32 function that returns variable-length arrays, and p/invoking any of the others has the same issue.

Simply declaring SizeConst to be bigger than we need – “hey, I know I’ll never get more than 10 or so strings back, so why not declare SizeConst to be 128?” – is inelegant (hardcoded upper limits, ugh) and doesn’t work properly anyway. Since the struct layout is sequential the marshaller will copy over (e.g.) 128*sizeof(IntPtr) sequential bytes (a total of 512 bytes, in this case). That much memory was never allocated on the unmanaged side, so we end up with a load of junk in the tail of pStringArray, and more often than not the marshaller chokes on this junk and throws an AccessViolationException. Fun.

There IS a way to get round the problem, though. I’m not sure it’s the best way, but it works and seems stable, so I thought I’d throw it out there in case anyone else can use it (or maybe explain to me why it’s an unsafe stupid thing to do…)

Basically, since we’re dealing with sequential memory, we can use Marshal.PtrToStructure to marshal the DNS_TXT_DATA structure as defined above, then use pointer arithmetic to gain access to any further data that needs marshalling.

Pointer arithmetic? Oh yes, even in the safe and secure world of managed code it’s sometimes still necessary to get our hands dirty, and situations like this illustrate that it will always be valuable to have some hard-earned Assembly/C/C++ war wounds.

So, assuming we have valid p/invoke declarations and data structures (I’ve included a complete source program below), DnsQuery is called like so:

var pServers = IntPtr.Zero;
var ppQueryResultsSet = IntPtr.Zero;
var ret = DnsQuery(domain,
        DnsRecordType.TEXT,
        DnsQueryType.STANDARD,
        pServers,
        ref ppQueryResultsSet,
        IntPtr.Zero);
if (ret != 0)
    throw new ApplicationException("DnsQuery failed: " + ret);

If we examine the memory location of ppQueryResultsSet (Ctrl-Alt-M,1 or Debug->Windows->Memory->Memory1 in Visual Studio) we’ll see something like the following (actual address locations may vary – just copy the int value of ppQueryResultsSet to the Address bar of the memory window):

0x049E0878  00 00 00 00  ....
0x049E087C  b8 09 9e 04  ¸.ž.
0x049E0880  10 00 20 00  .. .
0x049E0884  19 30 00 00  .0..
0x049E0888  00 00 00 00  ....
0x049E088C  00 00 00 00  ....
0x049E0890  06 00 00 00  ....
0x049E0894  b8 08 9e 04  ¸.ž.
0x049E0898  d8 08 9e 04  Ø.ž.
0x049E089C  f8 08 9e 04  ø.ž.
0x049E08A0  28 09 9e 04  (.ž.
0x049E08A4  68 09 9e 04  h.ž.
0x049E08A8  88 09 9e 04  ˆ.ž.

I’ve set the column size to 4 here, as most of the values we are dealing with are 4 bytes in size. This effectively shows one value per line.

The first 6 rows (24 bytes) correspond to the DNS_RECORD structure up until (but not including) the DNS_TXT_DATA structure in DNS_RECORD’s Data union. We can marshal this first structure without problem:

var dnsRecord = (DnsRecord) Marshal.PtrToStructure(
        ppQueryResultsSet, typeof (DnsRecord));

The DNS_TXT_DATA structure starts at address 0x049E0890 in my example. Having already marshalled the DNS_RECORD structure, now I want a pointer to the DNS_TXT_DATA structure. I can do this by creating a new pointer at the address of ppQueryResultsSet plus 24 bytes, and marshalling again:

var ptr = new IntPtr(
        ppQueryResultsSet.ToInt32() + Marshal.SizeOf(dnsRecord));
var txtData = (DNS_TXT_DATA) Marshal.PtrToStructure(
        ptr, typeof (DNS_TXT_DATA));

Because of the definition of DNS_TXT_DATA, this only marshals 8 bytes – 4 bytes for dwStringCount, and 4 bytes for the single element in pStringArray (an IntPtr). Since we know the memory is sequential, however, this gives us everything we need – we now know how many strings have been received (6 in this case, as indicated at 0x049E0890), and the location of the pointer to the first string (0x049E0894).

With this info, we can marshal all the pointers into an array with a length of dwStringCount:

ptr = new IntPtr(ptr.ToInt32() + sizeof (uint)); // move to first
var ptrs = new IntPtr[txtData.dwStringCount]; // dest array
Marshal.Copy(ptr, ptrs, 0, ptrs.Length);

And finally we iterate through those pointers, marshalling the string pointed at by each:

var strings = new List<string>();
for (var i = 0; i < ptrs.Length; ++i)
{
    strings.Add(Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi(ptrs[i]));
}

While the example I’ve presented here is specific to DnsQuery, the general approach should be applicable to any situation where you need to marshal a data structure containing a variable-length array.

Source code

“Find the greatest product of five consecutive digits in the 1000-digit number.

73167176531330624919225119674426574742355349194934
96983520312774506326239578318016984801869478851843
85861560789112949495459501737958331952853208805511
12540698747158523863050715693290963295227443043557
66896648950445244523161731856403098711121722383113
62229893423380308135336276614282806444486645238749
30358907296290491560440772390713810515859307960866
70172427121883998797908792274921901699720888093776
65727333001053367881220235421809751254540594752243
52584907711670556013604839586446706324415722155397
53697817977846174064955149290862569321978468622482
83972241375657056057490261407972968652414535100474
82166370484403199890008895243450658541227588666881
16427171479924442928230863465674813919123162824586
17866458359124566529476545682848912883142607690042
24219022671055626321111109370544217506941658960408
07198403850962455444362981230987879927244284909188
84580156166097919133875499200524063689912560717606
05886116467109405077541002256983155200055935729725
71636269561882670428252483600823257530420752963450″

The first step here is to find a representation for that fairly humungous number. Obviously it’s not going to fit into a paltry 32-bit int…but then we don’t need it to. The problem description requires us to think in terms of smaller (5-digit) numbers, not one giant 1000-digit number.

So, it is sufficient for us to consider the number as an enumerable stream of single digits, which we can conveniently represent as IEnumerable. I could use a macro to convert the number into a collection initialiser, but it’s much easier to treat the string as an IEnumerable<char> and let LINQ do the heavy lifting.

var nums = Enumerable.AsEnumerable(
        "73167176531330624919225119674426574742355349194934" +
        "96983520312774506326239578318016984801869478851843" +
 
        // ..... etc etc ......
 
        "05886116467109405077541002256983155200055935729725" +
        "71636269561882670428252483600823257530420752963450"
        ).Select(x => Convert.ToInt32(x.ToString()));

This gives us an IEnumerable<int> containing every digit in the 1000-digit number. Now, the ‘obvious’ way to solve the problem is to iterate through the collection, and at each index multiply the value against the next four indexes. A simple loop should deal with it:

private static int SimpleSolver(int[] ints)
{
    int max = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < ints.Length - 4; i++)
    {
        int tmp = ints[i] * ints[i + 1] * ints[i + 2]
            * ints[i + 3] * ints[i + 4];
        max = Math.Max(max, tmp);
    }
 
    return max;
}

As ever, though, that’s pretty ugly – the loop condition and product calculation is tied to the sequence size of 5, and messing with an index variable is tedious.

An alternative approach is to take advantage of LINQ’s Skip and Take methods to split the problem domain into overlapping ‘slices’. Similar to the for loop above, the core of the approach is to iterate through the digits, and at each digit grab a number of subsequent digits and calculate the product.

Lets look at the 5-digit slices available from the first 10 digits:

  7   3   1   6   7   1   7   6   5   3
|       73167       |
    |       31671       |
        |       16717       |
            |       67176       |
                |       71765       |
                    |       17653       |

We can use Skip to progressively move the starting index forward, and Take to grab the 5 digits we need. So, starting with i=0, each successive slice can be sliced from the whole with:

var slice = ints.Skip(i++).Take(5);

To calculate the product of the digits in the slice, we can use the Aggregate operation:

slice.Aggregate(1, (curr, next) => curr*next);

We’ve met Aggregate before – it’s basically a fold, which collapses a sequence to a single item by repeatedly applying an operation to an accumulating result.

This can all be wrapped up as an iterator block, like so:

private static IEnumerable<int> EnumerateSlices(
        IEnumerable<int> ints, int sliceSize)
{
    int i = 0;
    while (true)
    {
        var slice = ints.Skip(i++).Take(sliceSize);
 
        if (slice.Count() < sliceSize)
            yield break; // end
 
        yield return slice.Aggregate(1,
                (curr, next) => curr*next);
    }
}

Note the termination condition – when we have enumerated every slice, our next slice will contain only 4 elements (3, 4, 5, and 0 from the end of the sequence) – that’s our cue to exit the loop.

Also note that this approach makes the algorithm trivial to parameterize – it will work just as well with slice sizes other than 5.

This iterator will produce an IEnumerable containing the products of all slices, so the final step is to select the largest:

var result = EnumerateSlices(nums, 5).Max();

I don’t know why macros are so underused. It might be a mindset thing – it can take a little while to develop the ability to spot repetitive editing tasks quickly (i.e. not when you’re 75% of the way through thinking dang, I have to do this again?), so maybe many people never quite make the leap.

It’s worth it though, because once you get your eye in you see chances to use macros everywhere.

I had a useful example just yesterday, in which I needed to make a change to a colossal switch statement (220 branches! Run the cyclomatic-complexity doohickey on THAT!) and had no unit tests to fall back on.

If I had to modify (and hopefully refactor) such a huge construct I wanted to be able to compare before-and-after test results, but I didn’t much fancy hand-cranking a few hundred unit tests.

By recording a temporary macro, however, it took just a couple of minutes to cover every branch. I’ve decided to post a detailed walkthrough of the process here in the hopes that a fairly simple example will be illustrative for those that don’t already lean heavily on macros.

Note that this is not an advanced tutorial. Please refrain from leaving snarky comments about how macros are so much more powerful than this – I’m just doing some introductory material here

Here is a representative snippet of the C# source. It’s part of a legacy permissioning system that, under certain circumstances, needs to check for the existence of a permission represented by an enum against a permission table containing a string-based hierarchy (application/role/permission). The code I was modifying did the appropriate conversion:

    case PermissionKey.SecurityParameterManagementAdd:
    {
        return new string[] {"Security", "ParameterManagement", "Add"};
    }
    case PermissionKey.SecurityRoleManagementAdd:
    {
        return new string[] {"Security", "RoleManagement", "Add"};
    }
    case PermissionKey.SecurityRoleManagementModify:
    {
        return new string[] {"Security", "RoleManagement", "Modify"};
    }
    case PermissionKey.SecurityUserManagementDelete:
    {
        return new string[] {"Security", "UserManagement", "Delete"};
    }
    case PermissionKey.SecurityPermissionManagementAdd:
    {
        return new string[] {"Security", "PermissionManagement", "Add"};
    }

I needed to add a couple of branches to this, but I also wanted to tidy up the code by removing the superfluous braces, as a precursor to converting it into something a bit more robust and maintainable. I wanted unit test coverage to give me confidence that I hadn’t mucked up some logic and inadvertantly granted admin access to the helpdesk trainee role or something.

So, I copied the entire switch body into Notepad++ (well, vim really, but I’ll pretend it’s Notepad++ for the sake of making this post a bit more accessible) and set to work^[1].

Before recording my macro, I needed to do a bit of preprocessing to trim the code down to just the data I wanted to work with. The following steps show the ‘find’ regexes I used (in each case, the value of the replace field was empty, so these are effectively deletes), and the effect on the first switch branch from the list above:

1) Remove opening and closing braces from every switch branch:

^\s+[\{\}]$

    case PermissionKey.SecurityParameterManagementAdd:
 
        return new string[] {"Security", "ParameterManagement", "Add"};

2) Remove blanks – TextFX/Edit/Delete Blank Lines

    case PermissionKey.SecurityParameterManagementAdd:
        return new string[] {"Security", "ParameterManagement", "Add"};

3) Remove case statements and leading whitespace:

^\s+case\s+

PermissionKey.SecurityParameterManagementAdd:
PermissionKey.SecurityParameterManagementAdd:
        return new string[] {"Security", "ParameterManagement", "Add"};

4) Remove colon from end of case statement:

:$

5) Remove return statement and leading whitespace:

^\s+return new string\[\]\s*

I ended up with a sequence of couplets looking similar to this one:

PermissionKey.SecurityParameterManagementAdd
{"Security", "ParameterManagement", "Add"};

Now the fun starts – lets walk through the process.

We want to convert the first couplet into a simple unit test fixture, and record the process. This will be our macro – the instructions for converting one couplet into one unit test. We can then play the macro multiple times to convert all the others effortlessly.

Start by moving the cursor to the start of the line, before the ‘P’ of PermissionKey. This is the start point of the macro, so for the macro to be repeatable we must make sure that we finish recording the macro in perfect position to run it again, i.e. before the ‘P’ of PermissionKey for the next couplet (column 0 line 3). Hit Ctrl-Shift-R to start recording.

It is important not to use the mouse when editing – stick to the keyboard. It’s also important not to record keystrokes that are too specific to one bit of code. For instance, don’t use the arrow keys to move left and right character-by-character, because it won’t work on longer or shorter lines.

Instead, use the Home and End keys to jump to the start or end of the line, and hold Ctrl whilst arrowing left or right to move a word at a time instead of a character at a time (this is one of the areas where vim’s movement commands really differentiate it from wannabes like Notepad++…but I digress). See the ‘Detailed Instructions’ section below for more information.

Assume the original switch body is in a method called ‘LookupEnumPermission’. The couplet should be edited to look like this (without the linewrap…):

[Test]
public void TestSecurityParameterManagementAdd()
{
    string[] result = LookupEnumPermission(
            PermissionKey.SecurityParameterManagementAdd);
    Assert.AreEqual("Security", result[0]);
    Assert.AreEqual("ParameterManagement", result[1]);
    Assert.AreEqual("Add", result[2]);
}

Make sure you finish by moving the cursor into position for the next couplet, and hit Ctrl-Shift-R again to stop recording.

Now, hit Ctrl-Shift-P to play back the macro. If you’ve done everything right, the next couplet should magically format itself into a unit test. Hit Ctrl-Shift-P again, and the next couplet will change too. Under the Macro menu, select ‘Run a macro multiple times…’ and you can enter a fixed number of iterations, or just apply the macro over and over again until the end of the file is reached.

Finally, you can copy the unit tests into a new or existing test fixture, and you’re done! In much less time (hopefully) and with fewer errors than if the tests had been written one-by-one.

Detailed Instructions:

These are ley-by-key instructions in Notepad++, in case something in the description above is unclear. Visual Studio should be similar. Vim will be faster once you’ve learned how, but I’ll assume if you use vim you’re already au fait with this sort of editing

1. Type [Test], and hit enter to start a new line.
2. Type ‘public void Test’ and hit Enter.
3. Type ‘{‘ and hit Enter, then Tab.
4. Hold Ctrl and tap the right arrow twice to jump over a couple of words and place the cursor at the start of the word SecurityParameterManagementAdd, then hold Ctrl-Shift and right arrow again to select the word. Ctrl-C to copy, then arrow up two lines and paste it after the word ‘Test’ to create the full function name TestSecurityParameterManagementAdd. Type () for the empty parameter list.
5. Arrow down two lines and hit Home to jump to the start of the line. Type ‘string[] result = LookupEnumPermission(‘, then hit End to jump to the end of the line and type ‘);’.
6. Arrow down one line, hit Home, then Tab. Type ‘Assert.Equals(‘ then hit Delete to remove the ‘{‘. Hold Ctrl and move right three times (to move the cursor just past the comma) and type ‘result[0]);’ and hit Enter.
7. Repeat variations of step 7 a couple of times to convert the next two lines. Remember to use the correct indexes (result[1] and result[2]). Hit Enter after the last line and type ‘}’ to close the function body.
8. Arrow down one line and hit Home to place the cursor at the correct start position for the next couplet, and end the macro by hitting Ctrl-Shift-R again.

^[1]I could have just done this in a new file in Visual Studio, but for some reason I find VS intolerably slow at running macros once recorded. So slow, in fact, that you can watch the cursor laboriously complete each step – I wind up thinking it would have been quicker to do it manually. That might just be something odd about my VS installation though, as no-one else seems to think it’s slow.

Still, I wanted it to be a decent learning experience, so after a brief dalliance with Rails I scrapped the idea of using any framework sorcery and decided to write everything in plain ol’ PHP, and lean heavily on YUI and jQuery to sort out the browser stuff.

This probably isn’t an approach I’d use in future projects, but I bet I’ll appreciate those frameworks a lot more once I’ve encountered and understood the problems they attempt to solve.

So, having strayed from the comfort of Rails and its clones, I had to think about lots of things like security, validation, data access, and how to organise my code. Just because I’d abandoned the training wheels I had no intention of falling over all the time – I still wanted a nice, maintainable app with sensible  abstractions, properly decoupled, and resilient to failure. Time to start reading articles and the odd open source project, obviously.

It’s at this point I noticed something interesting. Since I regularly read plenty of development websites it could scarcely have escaped my notice that the trendy framework players (e.g. Rails, Django, Cake, ASP.NET MVC) strongly advocate the MVC pattern and class-based object-oriented design. What I hadn’t really realised until now is how endemic that viewpoint had become.

In fact, beyond a few admirably out-there frameworks like Seaside, it’s almost universal. OOD = good, EVERYTHING ELSE = bad. MVC = good, EVERYTHING ELSE = bad. No shades of grey, no room for dissenting opinion.

Go anywhere where best-practices are discussed and mention you’re writing some procedural code, and watch the fireworks. It doesn’t matter if your application has fewer lines of code than a newly-created Rails app has source files – if you haven’t structured it with models, views, and controllers you may as well have written it in Visual Basic for all the bile you’re going to have thrown at you.

If you say you’re writing functional code, you might get away with it, since functional programming is still widely misunderstood and you’ll likely be classified as some weird LISPer or Schemer doing something arcane and thus ignored.

Ironically, of course, if you grab a random Rails/Django/Cake app from github or Google Code, there’s a pretty fair chance that what you’ll find isn’t particularly object-oriented anyway. Hint – usage of the ‘class’ keyword does not an object-oriented design make. And sweet zombie Jesus, I’ve never seen such abuse of the singleton pattern. That’s a sure sign someone doesn’t ‘get’ OO – the singleton pattern is evil and basically a way to shoehorn globals into an application without admitting it to your friends.

So, we have massive fanatical advocacy of a technique that will allegedly solve all your problems, coupled with large-scale real-world misunderstandings and misapplication. Does this remind anyone of anything? Say, for example, the last time OOD swept the world, panacea to all programming woes, about 20 or so years ago?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that class-based OO itself is just a fad – it deserves its place as a paradigm alongside procedural, functional, parallel, and numerous others. It’s the heralding of OO as the one true way that seems faddish.

So, in the very best “bah, humbug” traditions I’ve written my app in unashamedly procedural PHP code. I don’t mix my presentation and content. My data layer is decoupled and unit tested. Every bit of SQL is a parameterised query, to guard against injection. I don’t have a single echo() statement containing any html tags. All my errors are exception based, and I don’t have a single die() call anywhere. My average function size is about 10 lines, and my longest is about 20. I’ve no doubt that there’s a legion of 15-year-old self-appointed geniuses ready to accuse me of inflicting yet more spaghetti code junk on the world just because “find . -iname ‘*php’ | xargs grep class” comes up empty, but hey I’m OK with that.

I’m writing my next app in brainf*ck using ed.

By listing the first six prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13, we can see that the 6^th prime is 13.

What is the 10001^st prime number?

Ah, what a nice, straightforward, unambiguous spec! If only business software specifications were so precise.

Way back in problem 3, I took a bit of a wander off-topic and built a prime generator in .Net using the Sieve of Eratosthenes. Armed with this, problem 7 should be easy, right? The sieve implementation generates an IEnumerable, which is non-indexable (i.e. I can’t just say Primes()[10001]), but I can take the first 10,001 and then ask for the last element, which will be the answer to the problem.

There’s a problem with this, however. The sieve requires an upper bound during initialisation. This means it’s great for solving problems like “generate all the primes less than 10,001″, but not so great at answering questions like “what is the 10,001st prime number?”, since it requires foreknowledge of the upper bound.

To illustrate the problem, I’ll take a wild guess at the upper bound. I’m going to guess that the 10,001st prime number is less than 99,999. What happens?

var sieve = new SieveOfEratosthenes(99999);
var result = sieve.Primes().Take(10001).Last();

This generates an answer of 99,991. If I enter this into the Project Euler website, however, it tells me the answer is wrong. Gah! What went wrong? A simple test reveals the problem:

var sieve = new SieveOfEratosthenes(99999);
var primes = sieve.Primes().Take(10001);
var count = primes.Count();

There’s only 9,592 primes generated! As the docs for Take() state (emphasis mine):

Take<TSource> enumerates source and yields elements until count elements have been yielded or source contains no more elements.

Damn. So, looks like my 99,999 guess was too small – with that as an upper bound, the sieve only finds 9,592 primes, and I need the 10,001st. OK, I’ll bump it up by an order of magnitude:

var sieve = new SieveOfEratosthenes(999999);
var result = sieve.Primes().Take(10001).Last();

This gives me the correct answer. Not exactly a wonderful solution though; the idea of having to guess the upper bound is pretty horrendous, and if this was real code it wouldn’t be particularly maintainable – what if the requirements changed and we had to find the nth prime, which happened to be >99,999? We’d have to guess again. Ugh.

Worse, the sieve algorithm precomputes all the primes up to the specified upper bound, meaning that in the above approach I’ve asked the sieve to generate primes up to 999,999 (all 78,498 of them!) despite only needing 10,001. Not very efficient.

Fortunately, the upper bound can be calculated separately. Where n>8601, as in this case, we can use the following equation:

p(n) < n (loge n + loge loge n - 0.9427)

where p(n) is the nth prime number.

Alternatively, for flexibility in handling n<8601, we can use the less accurate

p(n) < n loge loge n

which works for n>5. We can easily precompute the answers for n<=5, or simply calculate on demand.

The formula can be implemented on the sieve class, with a factory method to help when we want to use it:

public static SieveOfEratosthenes
    CreateSieveWithAtLeastNPrimes(int n)
{
    return new SieveOfEratosthenes((long)
            Math.Ceiling(UpperBoundEstimate(n)));
}
 
private static double UpperBoundEstimate(int n)
{
    return n * Ln(n) + n * (Ln(Ln(n)));
}
 
private static double Ln(double n)
{
    return Math.Log(n, Math.E);
}

This leaves us with an overall solution like so:

var sieve = SieveOfEratosthenes.CreateSieveWithAtLeastNPrimes(10001);
var result = sieve.Primes().Take(10001).Last();

This generates a total 10,018 primes, cutting the wasted effort from almost 70,000 superfluous primes to just 17, and takes around 20ms to execute on my machine. Plenty fast enough, I think.

A couple of days ago Coding Horror carried a fluff piece about how all developers should be marketers too. Predictably, the article soon got posted to proggit where it was ripped on by reddit’s resident Jeff-haters, and even more predictably the comments were a mix of interesting insight and barely-concealed hate.

Apparently some of them got up Jeff’s nose a bit, and today he responded. The core of his rebuttal seems to be that you shouldn’t trust what you read on blogs, and should verify everything yourself. True enough, I guess, if perhaps a bit impractical given the sheer amount of information out there.

Then, however, Jeff goes on to give an example by referencing a compression benchmark he’d read on a blog and providing counter-analysis to show that the benchmark was wrong in claiming Deflate is faster than gzip. In doing so, much knowledge was gained.

Or so we are told.

The comment thread quickly becomes a goldmine of humour. Bugs in Jeff’s benchmarking code (not resetting the stopwatch) meant that the durations were cumulative, not independent, with inevitable distortion of the results. Another commenter pointed out that gzip cannot possibly be faster than Deflate, since the gzip algorithm IS the Deflate algorithm plus some additional computation.

“gzip” is often also used to refer to the gzip file format, which is:

• a 10-byte header, containing a magic number, a version number and a timestamp
• optional extra headers, such as the original file name,
• a body, containing a DEFLATE-compressed payload
• an 8-byte footer, containing a CRC-32 checksum and the length of the original uncompressed data

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip

With the benchmarking code fixed, we see that Deflate is indeed slightly faster than gzip.

All of which leads to repeated quotations from Jeff about the community being smarter than him, and some drastic toning down of language in post-publication edits to the article. I read a cached version of the RSS feed, which is markedly different to the article currently live on codinghorror.com – “on my box, GZip is twice as fast as Deflate” becomes “on my box, GZip is just as fast as Deflate”, “Deflate is way slower. It’s not even close” becomes “Deflate is nowhere near 40% faster”, etc.

Anyone who’s tackled a major performance problem will likely agree that profiling is a tremendously valuable technique that should always be applied before attempting to optimise (i.e. look before you leap). I think this little episode has highlighted a couple of important things to bear in mind, however:

1. Profiling isn’t a magic wand – if you use buggy profiling code, you are leading yourself up the garden path.
2. Profiling is less useful when you can reason (in the mathematical sense) about the code. That involves understanding the algorithms you are dealing with. Gzip is Deflate plus a bit more processing – so unless that extra processing has a negative duration gzip must necessarily take longer. You don’t need a profiler to work that out. Look before you look before you leap.

Anyway, enough hatcheting from me, normal service will be resumed shortly.

Problem 6

The sum of the squares of the first ten natural numbers is,

1² + 2² + … + 10² = 385

The square of the sum of the first ten natural numbers is,

(1 + 2 + … + 10)² = 55² = 3025

Hence the difference between the sum of the squares of the first ten natural numbers and the square of the sum is 3025 385 = 2640.

Find the difference between the sum of the squares of the first one hundred natural numbers and the square of the sum.

Bit of a disappointment, problem 6; it’s too easy. It’s rated as the third-easiest, i.e. easier than problems 3, 4, and 5 which I’ve already covered. In fact, for my money it’s easier than problem 2 as well. Ah well, the difficulty ramps up soon enough, trust me.  Here’s the very simple python solution:

sum_sq = sum([ x*x for x in xrange(1, 101)])
sq_sum = sum(xrange(1, 101)) ** 2
 
print sq_sum - sum_sq

As you can see, it’s pretty intuitive. You sum the squares, square the sum, and calculate the difference. The answer is basically in the description, you just have to scale up a little.

There’s not much else to say about this one. Even if I abandon the functional approach and write a straightforward imperative solution it’s still very straightforward. In (deliberately non-idiomatic, so don’t whine at me) ruby:

sum_of_squares = 0
sum = 0
 
1.upto 100 do |x|
    sum_of_squares += x * x
    sum += x
end
 
p (sum * sum) - sum_of_squares

Why do we keep doing it? Convenience? Laziness? Tiredness? Is unreadable spaghetti code some sort of steady-state/equilibrium for code? Is it a natural consequence of the vague and squidgy limitations of our evolved monkey-brains? Or is well-designed code abhorred like a vacuum and naturally atrophies into the sort of shambles you dread seeing on your first day at a new job, unless well-intentioned and dedicated people actively work to clean and polish it, like the Forth Bridge?

I don’t have the time or wit to give this subject the treatment it deserves, but I do want to rant a bit about another symptom of this disease, which has given me a couple of sleepless nights recently. I refer, as the title might suggest, to magic numbers.

Magic numbers are constants, unnamed in the most pathological cases, that represent an assumption or a limit in a piece of code. They often cause problems because soon they are forgotten about or their meaning is lost – and then something happens to invalidate the assumption, the code breaks, and all hell breaks loose.

Magic numbers, to stretch the definition a bit, can also be implicit. If you are using a 32-bit integer, your magic number is 2,147,483,647 – that’s the biggest number you can store in that type. Often, movement up to and beyond these ranges can trigger long-dormant bugs that are no fun at all to diagnose.

Three times in recent history I’ve been bitten by bugs of this class, triggered by auto-incrementing sequences in database. These are they:

1. A table in a database had a 32-bit integer primary key. At the time this seemed like a perfectly reasonable default, but insanely fast growth in usage of the system meant that the ~2.1billion upper limit of that data type was quickly reached. The DB column was switched to a 64-bit integer, but some of the client applications reading that table were not identified as at-risk. When the sequence generator left the 32-bit range, those applications overflowed. This happened at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon. Saturdays were peak-times for system usage. You can imagine the frantic hacking that ensued.
2. A sequence generator for a particular entity was started at 20,000,000, so as not to clash with the ID sequence of a related entity (that had started at 0 a good few years earlier). The similarity between the entities and the need to not have the IDs overlap had valid business justification, but the magic number was selected arbitrarily and promptly forgotten. Inevitably, the latter sequence surpassed that number, causing bizarre and difficult-to-trace entity relationship corruption that manifested as strangely-disappearing data on the front-end.
3. A stored procedure parameter was incorrectly declared as an OracleType.Float, when it should have been an OracleType.Int32. This resulted in the value being cast from an integer to a floating-point and back again. For the first 16,777,216 integers, this happens to work OK. For the value 16,777,217, however, the loss in precision means that the number changes during casting. This simple bit of (heavily contrived) code shows the problem:

   static void Main(string[] args)
   {
       for (int i = 0; i < 17000000; ++i)
       {
           if (i != (int)(float)i)
           {
               Console.WriteLine("{0} != {1}", i, (int)(float)i);
               break;
           }
       }
   }

   There are many numbers above 16,777,217 that have this characteristic; 16,777,217 just happens to be the first, for reasons you can probably divine if you think the IEEE floating-point spec is a riveting read. A couple of weeks after the launch of a fairly major internal application, this time-bomb exploded due to a sequence reaching the magic number. The bug was nothing to do with the new application, but of course fingers were pointed at it since a long-running and stable system had mysteriously choked very shortly after deployment of the new application.

Now, unquestionably, all these problems are avoidable, and a strong argument could be made that none of them should ever have been allowed to happen. Yet, for many reasons, they do. For example, first-mover advantage can mean the opportunity cost of taking the time to do things right first time is greater than the cost of fixing problems later.

Also, people make assumptions. The issue underlying the Millennium Bug hysteria was caused by well-meaning developers who knew that two-digit dates wouldn’t work after 1999 (effectively another magic number), but assumed the software would have been replaced or upgraded by then. No doubt that seemed a totally reasonable assumption in the 1970s, and it had genuine technical benefits (storage space was so tight that every byte saved was a battle won).

Anyway, I don’t have a magic bullet solution for this, I’m just venting spleen. Unit tests can help, but won’t magically eliminate this class of bug (no matter what some of the more extreme TDD fanatics might tell you), so I suppose the lesson to take from this is the importance of being able to recognise and diagnose potential magic number issues. Pay close attention to data types, type conversions, and current values of sequences in your database. Keeping a sacrifical goat on hand might pay dividends too, in case any blood-thirsty deities with a head for binary arithmetic are watching.

I’ve been playing around a bit recently with the June CTP in the context of batching up web service calls, as that’s something I do quite a lot. One particular problem that comes up occasionally is a two-stage series of requests to download a complete set of paged data. I might do this if I wanted to download an entire discussion thread, for instance, or a large account statement from my online bank.

Typically in this situation the web service will limit the number of records I can retrieve in one request, and allow me to specify start and count parameters to the request. The response will also include a total record count, so I know how much data there is.

The normal use case for this is to request the first page of data, and use the total record count to display a list of page links that my user can click on to navigate the data or jump to any page. In my case, however, I want ALL the data as quickly as possible.

So, imagine a situation where I am using a service that lets me download a maximum of 200 records per request. My first step is to request the maximum 200 records starting from index 0, i.e. the first page of data. In the response will be a total record count – if that number is equal to the number of records I got back (i.e. <= 200) I’ve got everything in one hit and can stop. But what if the total record count is, say, 1000? I need to make four more requests (since I’ve already got records 1-200, I have 800 more to get in batches of 200 each).

Naturally I want to do this asynchronously, using as few resources as I can. This means all webservice calls should be using the APM pattern (thus using IO completion ports, and not consuming worker threads from the thread pool or creating my own threads) and, preferably, not blocking anywhere except when I actually need some data before continuing.

The two-stage process can be successfully captured asynchronously by combining a future and a continuation. I encapsulate the initial request in a Future object (which is a subclass of Task), and handle the check-record-count-and-get-more-records-if-required logic in the continuation. The code for this basically looks as follows:

public Future<List<Item>> GetAllItemsAsync()
{
    var f = Create<GetItemsResponse>(
            ac => Service.BeginGetItems(0, ac, null),
            Service.EndGetItems);

    var start = 200;

    var resultFuture = f.ContinueWith(
        r =>
            {
                // Batch retrieval here...
            });

    return resultFuture;
}

In order to support the APM pattern neatly, I’m using the following method from the PFX blog:

private static Future<T> Create<T>(
        Action<AsyncCallback> beginFunc,
        Func<IAsyncResult, T> endFunc)
{
    var f = Future<T>.Create();
    beginFunc(iar =>
        {
            try
            {
                f.Value = endFunc(iar);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                f.Exception = e;
            }
        });
    return f;
}

This could be coded as an extension method, though I haven’t bothered yet as I’m hopeful this immensely useful snippet will be integrated into the library itself.

Now I need to make a number of calls to get the rest of the data, so I loop until I’ve made the required number of async service calls:

var resultFuture = f.ContinueWith(r =>
    {
        var items = new ConcurrentQueue<Item>();
        var handles = new List<WaitHandle>();

        while (start < r.Value.TotalRecordCount)
        {
            var asyncResult = Service.BeginGetItems(200,
                ar => Service.EndGetItems(ar).Items
                    .ForEach(items.Enqueue), null);

            handles.Add(asyncResult.AsyncWaitHandle);
            start += 200;
        }

        handles.ForEach(h => h.WaitOne());
        return items.ToList();
    });

I’m about 85% happy with this as an approach. I’m not completely happy, however, because of the WaitOne calls, which mean that I’m blocking on a threadpool thread until all the calls complete. Given that this is all wrapped up in a future, I may not actually need to access the data until well after the calls have completed, in which case I am wastefully consuming a threadpool thread for some period of time. So the $64,000 question is, how do I get rid of it? I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but my brain has gone on a protest march about all the time I’m forcing it to spend thinking about this stuff.

I got a wry smile from stevey’s post, as I recognise only too well the tendency to write narrative comments. I’m sure there’s plenty of code from early in my career still floating around in various company codebases where the code/comment ratio is something embarrassing. I’ve mostly shaken that off now, though I sometimes have to fight my inner raconteur when writing something I think is neat or clever.

Jeff Atwood, as is so often the case recently, contradicted his own previous post on the matter (replacing the statement “comments can never be replaced by code alone” with “if your feel your code is too complex to understand without comments, your code is probably just bad”) and endearingly veered wildly to and fro across a sensible medium^[1], without ever quite hitting it. Coding Horror, indeed.

So far, so blah; every time an argument on comments flares up we see the same thing. Something I’ve not noticed before though, either because I wasn’t paying attention or because it’s a new thing, is a trend amongst the I-don’t-need-comments crowd to advocate very long and detailed method names as an alternative.

As neophyte coders we all have it drilled into us that we must use descriptive names. Programming gospel, as handed down in sacred tomes such as Code Complete, tell us not to use names like ‘i’ and ‘tmp’ except in very specific circumstances (e.g. loop indexes and tempfile handles). And, without question, this is good solid advice. Take heed, young Padawan, etc.

But can you take it too far? It’s not something I’ve really come up against, but it seems to be increasingly popular. One response to Jeff’s post suggested (only in passing, to be fair) using a function name like newtonRaphsonSquareRoot. A digg comment (OK, OK, not exactly the fount of all knowledge) vehemently defended the virtue of the frankly-scary RunEndOfMonthReportsUnlessTheMonthStartsOnAFridayIn
WhichCaseRunTheWeeklyReportInstead (!)

The argument is that with names like these, you don’t need comments, since it is perfectly clear what the function does. Is it perfectly clear at the wrong level though? Function names like this, in my opinion, are so ‘clear’ that they leak. These are function names that violate the principle of encapsulation.

If I write a square root function, why do I need to burden all my clients with information about how I’ve implemented it? By naming it newtonRaphsonSquareRoot, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Unless there are specific performance implications/requirements that favour Newton-Raphson, in most cases my clients just want a damn square root calculated to within a specified tolerance and don’t care whether I used Newton’s method or one of the army of alternatives. The implementation should be private to the method, and no-one else’s business.

Worse, what if a requirements change means a switch to Walsh’s fast reciprocal method? Uh-oh, now my method name is completely misleading, so I have to change it. Oops, now I have to change all the client code that calls it! I’d better hope no-one has exposed this with [WebMethodAttribute] since I wrote it, otherwise there could be thousands of client applications out there relying on it. My funky rename refactoring can’t save me now.

If every tiny change propagates through the system requiring hundreds of source files to change, and possibly external apps as well, you may as well just copy ‘n’ paste the code everywhere it’s needed and doing away with the function completely. Hell, who needs abstraction anyway?

We all do, of course, which is why I think names like this are a bad smell. The same goes for RunEndOfMonthReportsUnless... – what happens when the requirements change? This method name couples the public interface (method name) to the private implementation, which is exactly what you’re not supposed to do. RunEndOfMonthReports is probably sufficient. Separate interface and implementation. This is programming 101, people, it shouldn’t be beyond our grasp.

^[1]I agree with Dan Dyer that the best choice is as follows:

/**
 *  Approximate the square root of n, to within the specified
 *  tolerance, using the Newton-Raphson method.
 */
private double approximateSquareRoot(double n, double tolerance)
{
    double root = n / 2;
    while (abs(root - (n / root)) > tolerance)
    {
        root = 0.5 * (root + (n / root));
    }
    return root;
}

The function name is descriptive and clear whilst remaining general enough to allow an alternative implementation. Anyone who cares enough about the implementation (for performance reasons, or simply curiosity) can find enough information in the comment to start their investigation, without having the details jammed in their face every time they call it.