How to make the compiler do your work

Before Christmas I spent a few weeks on a school project in computer science. The choice of technology was up to us, and I naturally took the safe path of .NET and C#. I used Visual Studio 2008 as IDE, as it had just come out, and I wanted to try it out. I also wanted to test C# 3.0, which the new IDE of course facilitated. Later I came to think that my team and I wanted to have the solution running on a web server, so the examiners would be able to see the actual prototype working. As I didn't have any options for running the prototype on a .NET 3.5 server, I had no choice but to make the solution .NET 3.0 compatible. This is no big thing in Visual Studio 2008 – you just change the target framework and recompile. Naturally a lot of compiler errors emerged. But to my surprise, they were all related to references to .NET 3.5 specific assemblies, and not my actual code! This got me thinking, and investigating.

I used "simple properties", which is an easier way of writing simple properties with no get/set logic, other than setting a backing field's value or returning it, a lot. When you write them in C#, it looks like this:



What happens when above is built is that the compiler generates the get_Id() and set_Id(int value) methods as before, but then also generates a backing field that reverse engineered looks something like this:



The funny thing is the naming of the generated field. Note the < and > symbols; they are used in order to avoid C# code accessing the field! If I try to get access to the field from a C# method, I will get a compiler error, as < and > are not allowed in the context.

The full property will look like this after being compiled:

I never thought of this, but as all the features of C# 3.0 are "syntactic sugar" changing the target framework while keeping the C# 3.0 compiler, I can have all the features, even though everything is compiled to C# 2.0! Great!

Oh, and by the way: Note the [CompilerGenerated] attribute. I want all of my compiled code to have that!

CBS - G1

Hey everyone

So, I been back at CBS for two days now, and have already heard about 100 people asking me about my G1. Not that I'm getting tired of it (I love being the center of attention) but sometimes I'm in the middle of something else when they attack me, wanting my autograph and personal tuition...

I have therefore decided to make the project availabe for download. You can find it right here:
Code: http://aoa.dk/demo/g1/code.zip
Text: http://aoa.dk/demo/g1/text.pdf


Please note that while I may have done a lot of code over the time, this project was my chance to get down and dirty with the special features of Java, and I haven't nailed every problem the most beautiful way...

I hope I can inspire someone to do better next time, or not loose it when things seem hard.

There where a few issues I had difficulties with as well.. For example the graph, which isn't actually correct.. So I was told. Another example is my use of LayoutManager's which may seem strange, because I was using the attempt-and-fail method while developing.

Get your Java!

I'm in the final phase of the G1-project for CBS now, and mostly writing the report... I read in the project description that we shall attach all classes in the project as text. Hmm.. That's a lot of pages with code!

I made a little utility (in C# of course) that reads all the files in your project and projects the content of them, with line number, in an HTML file...

I'm thinking a lot of people could use this right about now, so I made it available for download: Here.