Noda Time

Noda Time v1.0 released

By jonskeet

Go get Noda Time 1.0! NuGet package (and the testing package) Project home page Project downloads page v1.0 user guide v1.0 API reference Today is the end of the longest release cycle I’ve been personally involved in. On November 5th 2009, I announced my intention to write a port of Joda Time for .NET. The next day, Noda Time was born – with a lofty (foolhardy) set of targets. Near the end of a talk *about* Noda Time this evening, I released Noda Time 1.0.0. It’s taken three years, but I’m immensely proud of what we’ve managed to achieve. We’re … Continue reading Noda Time v1.0 released

The perils of conditional mutability

By jonskeet

This morning I was wrestling with trying to make some Noda Time unit tests faster. For some reason, the continuous integration host we’re using is really slow at loading resources under .NET 4. The unit tests which run in 10 seconds on my home laptop take over three hours on the continuous integration system. Taking stack traces at regular intervals showed the problem was with the NodaFormatInfo constructor, which reads some resources. I may look into streamlining the resource access later, but before we get to that point, I wanted to try to reduce the number of times we call … Continue reading The perils of conditional mutability

More fun with DateTime

By jonskeet

(Note that this is deliberately not posted in the Noda Time blog. I reckon it’s of wider interest from a design perspective, and I won’t be posting any of the equivalent Noda Time code. I’ll just say now that we don’t have this sort of craziness in Noda Time, and leave it at that…) A few weeks ago, I was answering a Stack Overflow question when I noticed an operation around dates and times which should have been losing information apparently not doing so. I investigated further, and discovered some "interesting" aspects of both DateTime and TimeZoneInfo. In an effort … Continue reading More fun with DateTime

Type initializer circular dependencies

By jonskeet

To some readers, the title of this post may induce nightmarish recollections of late-night debugging sessions. To others it may be simply the epitome of jargon. Just to break the jargon down a bit: Type initializer: the code executed to initialize the static variables of a class, and the static constructor Circular dependency: two bits of code which depend on each other – in this case, two classes whose type initializers each require that the other class is initialized A quick example of the kind of problem I’m talking about would be helpful here. What would you expect this code … Continue reading Type initializer circular dependencies

Subtleties in API design – member placement

By jonskeet

Noda Time is nearing v1.0, which means I’m spending more time writing documentation than code. It also means reviewing the APIs we’ve got with a critical eye – whether that’s removing extraneous members, adding useful ones, or moving things around. (In particular, writing documentation often suggests where a change would make calling code read more naturally.) This post is about one particular section of the API, and the choices available. Although I do go into some detail around the specific calls involved, that’s just for context… the underlying choices are ones which could be faced when designing any API. I’ve … Continue reading Subtleties in API design – member placement

Optimization and generics, part 2: lambda expressions and reference types

By jonskeet

As with almost any performance work, your mileage may vary (in particular the 64-bit JIT may work differently) and you almost certainly shouldn’t care. Relatively few people write production code which is worth micro-optimizing. Please don’t take this post as an invitation to make code more complicated for the sake of irrelevant and possibly mythical performance changes. It took me a surprisingly long time to find the problem described in the previous blog post, and almost no time at all to fix it. I understood why it was happening. This next problem took a while to identify at all, but … Continue reading Optimization and generics, part 2: lambda expressions and reference types

Optimization and generics, part 1: the new() constraint (updated: now with CLR v2 results)

By jonskeet

As with almost any performance work, your mileage may vary (in particular the 64-bit JIT may work differently) and you almost certainly shouldn’t care. Relatively few people write production code which is worth micro-optimizing. Please don’t take this post as an invitation to make code more complicated for the sake of irrelevant and possibly mythical performance changes. I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on Noda Time recently – and have started getting my head round all the work that James Keesey has put into the parsing/formatting. I’ve been reworking it so that we can do everything without throwing … Continue reading Optimization and generics, part 1: the new() constraint (updated: now with CLR v2 results)

The joys of date/time arithmetic

By jonskeet

(Cross-posted to my main blog and the Noda Time blog, in the hope that the overall topic is still of interest to those who aren’t terribly interested in Noda Time per se.) I’ve been looking at the "period" part of Noda Time recently, trying to redesign the API to simplify it somewhat. This part of the API is what we use to answer questions such as: What will the date be in 14 days? How many hours are there between now and my next birthday? How many years, months and days have I been alive for? I’ve been taking a … Continue reading The joys of date/time arithmetic

The curious case of the publicity-seeking interface and the shy abstract class

By jonskeet

Noda Time has a guilty secret, and I’m not just talking about the fact that there’s been very little progress on it recently. (It’s not dead as a project – I have high hopes, when I can put some quality time into it.) This secret is called LocalInstant, and it’s a pain in the neck. One of the nice things about giving talks about an API you’re currently writing is that you can see which concepts make sense to people, and which don’t – as well as seeing which concepts you’re able to explain and which you can’t. LocalInstant has … Continue reading The curious case of the publicity-seeking interface and the shy abstract class

You are all individuals! (I’m not…)

By jonskeet

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but recently a couple of events have coincided, reminding me about the issue. First, Joe Duffy blogged in defence of premature optimization. Second, I started reading Bill Wagner’s Effective C#, 2nd edition, which contains advice such as "make almost all your types serializable". Now, let’s be clear: I have a great deal of respect for both of these gentlemen… but in both cases I think there’s a problem: to some extent they’re assuming a certain type of development. In some cases, you really, really want to understand the nuts and bolts … Continue reading You are all individuals! (I’m not…)