Google

There’s a hole in my abstraction, dear Liza, dear Liza

By jonskeet

I had an interesting day at work today. I thought my code had broken… but it turns out it was just a strange corner case which made it work very slowly. Usually when something interesting happens in my code it’s quite hard to blog about it, because of all the confidentiality issues involved. In this case, it’s extremely easy to reproduce the oddity in an entirely vanilla manner. All we need is the Java collections API. I have a set – a HashSet, in fact. I want to remove some items from it… and many of the items may well … Continue reading There’s a hole in my abstraction, dear Liza, dear Liza

MVP Again

By jonskeet

I’m delighted to be able to announce that I’m now an MVP again. Google has reconsidered the situation and worked out a compromise: I now receive no significant gifts from Microsoft, and I’m not under NDA with them. While that precludes me from a lot of MVP activities, it removes any concerns to do with Google’s Code of Conduct. Basically my MVP status is truly just a token of Microsoft’s recognition of what I’ve done in the C# community – and that’s fine by me. When I announced that I’d been advised not to seek renewal, I was amazed at … Continue reading MVP Again

OS Jam at Google London: C# 4 and the DLR

By jonskeet

Last night I presented for the first time at the Google Open Source Jam at our offices in London. The room was packed, but only a very few attendees were C# developers. I know that C# isn’t the most popular language on the Open Source scene, but I was still surprised there weren’t more people using C# for their jobs and hacking on Ruby/Python/etc at night. All the talks at OSJam are just 5 minutes long, with 2 minutes for questions. I’m really not used to this format, and felt extremely rushed… however, it was still a lot of fun. … Continue reading OS Jam at Google London: C# 4 and the DLR

DotNetRocks interview

By jonskeet

Last Monday evening I had a chat with the guys from DotNetRocks, and today the show has gone live. I wouldn’t claim to have said anything particularly earth-shattering, and regular readers will probably be familiar with many of the themes anyway, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope you will too. Amongst other things, we talked about: Protocol buffers Implicit typing and anonymous types Why it doesn’t bother me that Office hasn’t been ported to .NET C# 4 My wishlist for C# Threading and Parallel Extensions Working for Google How to learn LINQ C# in Depth Feedback welcome. And yes, … Continue reading DotNetRocks interview

Lessons learned from Protocol Buffers, part 4: static interfaces

By jonskeet

Warning: During this entire post, I will use the word static to mean “relating to a type instead of an instance”. This isn’t a strictly accurate use but I believe it’s what most developers actually think of when they hear the word. A few members of the interfaces in Protocol Buffers have no logical reason to act on instances of their types. The message interface has members to return the message’s type descriptor (the PB equivalent of System.Type), the default instance for the message type, and a builder for the message type. The builder interface copies the first two of … Continue reading Lessons learned from Protocol Buffers, part 4: static interfaces

Lessons learned from Protocol Buffers, part 3: generic type relationships

By jonskeet

In part 2 of this series we saw how the message and builder interfaces were self-referential in order to allow the implementation types to be part of the API. That’s one sort of relationship, but in this post we’ll see how the two interfaces relate to each other. If you remember from part 1 every generated message type has a corresponding builder type. As it happens, this is implemented with a nested type, so if you had a Person message, the generated types would be Person and Person.Builder (in a specified namespace, of course). Without any interfaces involved, this would … Continue reading Lessons learned from Protocol Buffers, part 3: generic type relationships

Google release protocol buffers as an open source project

By jonskeet

Yesterday the Google open source blog announced a new open source project, to release one of the core pieces of Google infrastructure: protocol buffers. Basically protocol buffers are a way of encoding structured data in a language-neutral and versioning-friendly fashion. Yes, there are a lot of similar ways of doing similar things, but this happens to be the one we use. Currently the protocol buffer compiler (which takes .proto files and converts them into source for various languages) supports C++, Java and Python. I’m hoping to add C# to that list reasonably quickly. To start with this will just be … Continue reading Google release protocol buffers as an open source project