Bee Eee Blog

I’ve recently been writing an application that builds a linq to sql query dynamically.  For instance:

MyDataContext dc() = new MyDataContext;
var query = dc.MyTables;
query = query.Where( t=>t.id > 10);

and so I want to order it by a certain column:

query = query.OrderBy( t=>t.id )

but the problem is the order direction isn’t know before hand so at first I was stuck with the following:

if ( descending )
    query = query.OrderByDescending( t=>t.id);
else
    query = query.OrderBy(t=>t.id);

Now if there is only a few possible columns to sort against it isn’t too bad.  But when you have 10 different possible columns it really makes a lot of extra work just to control to sort direction.  So I made a little helper class that allows the following.  It works with linq and linq to sql:

query = query.OrderByAscDec( t=>t.id, descending );

here’s the static class that implments the OrderByAscDec function:

static class VPLinqExtensions
{
	public static IOrderedQueryable<TSource> OrderByAscDes<TSource, TKey>(
		this IQueryable<TSource> source,
		System.Linq.Expressions.Expression<Func<TSource,
		TKey>> keySelector, bool IsDescending)
	{
		if (IsDescending)
			return source.OrderByDescending(keySelector);
		else
			return source.OrderBy(keySelector);
	}
}

There doesn’t seem to be much written on blocking socket with c#.  So I’ll write a very short piece, and I’ll only concentrate on client sockets.

Creating a socket is easy here is how:

using System.Net.Sockets;

//...

// Creating a connection
Socket client;
client = new Socket( AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp );
client.Connect(hostName, port);
client.Blocking = false; // This needs to be done after Connect or it will error out.

Here’s how to write data to the socket

// Writing information to the socket
byte[] buffer = ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetBytes(messageText);
foreach (byte c in buffer)
{
	SocketError err = SocketError.WouldBlock;
	// need to try again if the socket would have blocked
	while ( err == SocketError.WouldBlock )
	{
		// this version of Send must be used or an exception would be thrown, which I feel is a pain
		// to deal with -- this way you can see handle the error appropriately.
		client.Send(buffer, 0, 1, SocketFlags.None, out err );
	}

	if ( err != SocketError.Success )
	{
		// handle error
		break;
	}
}

And now code to read from a non-blocking socket

// Reading from the socket
// this loop keeps going until there is a socket error or a '0' byte is read which
// in this example marks the end of the message
System.Text.StringBuilder message = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
while ( true )
{
	byte c = 0;
	int bytesRead;
	SocketError err;
	// read a character.
	bytesRead = client.Receive(buffer, 0, 1, SocketFlags.None, out err );
	// checking what happened
	if ( SocketError.Success == err )
	{
		// read a byte!  Let's process it
		if ( bytesRead > 0 )
		{
			// found a null character -- in this case it makes the end of a message.
			if (c == 0)
			{
				// null terminated message received
				break;
			}
			else
				message.Append((char)c);
			}
		}
	}
	else if ( SocketError.WouldBlock != err )
	{
		break;
	}
}

Reading the contents of a web page can be very useful.  Here’s some code I’m developing to read the historical stock prices from http://finance.google.com

string uri = "http://finance.google.com/finance/historical?cid=667226&startdate=Sep+9%2C+2007&enddate=Sep+10%2C+2008&output=csv";
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(uri);
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
var stream = response.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream, Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8"));
string page = reader.ReadToEnd();

There you go. Very simple isn’t it? Just got to love .Net