Rash thoughts about .NET, C#, F# and Dynamics NAV.


"Every solution will only lead to new problems."

Tuesday, 16. April 2013


Don’t be that guy!

Filed under: C# — Steffen Forkmann at 9:21 Uhr

I love to work on open source projects, but from time to time I have my doubts. My friend Daniel Nauck created a wonderful open source licensing project (see my blog post) and now we had to see this:

image

I am not a lawyer and rebranding a tool might be permitted by the MIT license, but seriously what are they thinking?

They even removed license information from the source files.

// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
// included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

It’s really ironic to violate the license of a licensing tool, but please don’t be that guy!

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Monday, 8. April 2013


Stati-C/AL Prism – Static analysis for Microsoft Dynamics NAV reloaded

Filed under: Dynamics NAV 2013,F#,Navision — Steffen Forkmann at 9:07 Uhr

Christian Clausen and Bent Rasmussen released their second static analysis tool for Dynamics NAV called Prism. This time it has more features and it’s even faster than Supervision.

“Load time for Developers Toolkit for a typical full database is approximately 25 minutes which compares to Prism’s 20 seconds. Load time is a serious productivity and/or quality killer, as people will either work with old objects in Developers Toolkit, wait another 25 minutes to reprocess the objects, or even decide to just go ahead and change code without understanding how the current code is actually working.”

[project page]

The biggest new feature is “Find usages”:

image

Check out the project page and watch the presentation at the Community for F# which gives some details about the implementation.

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Friday, 5. April 2013


Stati-C/AL Supervision – blazing-fast static analysis for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Filed under: Dynamics NAV 2009,Dynamics NAV 2013,F#,Navision — Steffen Forkmann at 17:26 Uhr

Until yesterday I thought I would be the only person on this planet who plays with a combination of F# and Dynamics NAV. Turned out I was wrong. Smiley

Christian Clausen and Bent Rasmussen created a really really cool static analysis tool for Dynamics NAV written in F#. For those who worked with the Dynamics NAV Developer’s Toolkit this is your new friend:

image

“Supervision is a free software program which can transform C/AL object text files into color-coded hyper-linked interactive HTML files.

The purpose of Supervision is to give Microsoft Dynamics NAV developers an easy and intuitive way to browse C/AL source code which provides better insight into the semantics of C/AL programs.”

[Project page]

Some of the features are:

  • Produces HTML/JavaScript code from Microsoft Dynamics NAV text export files
  • Usages of user-defined functions, variables, parameters, fields, system-defined variables, and object types link to their declaration
  • Usages of C/AL system functions link to official Microsoft C/AL language documentation
  • Code coloring
  • It’s blazing-fast Zwinkerndes Smiley

Check out the project page and watch the presentation at the Community for F# which gives some details about the implementation.

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Wednesday, 3. April 2013


A tale of nulls – part I

Filed under: F#,Informatik — Steffen Forkmann at 17:43 Uhr

Triggered by a short tweet by Tomas Petricek and a blog post by Don Syme I had a couple of conservations about null as a value, Null as a type (Nothing in Scala), the null object pattern and the Maybe monad (or Option type in F#). I decided to share my opinion on this topic in order to help others to make their own opinion.

Part I – Null as a value

Unfortunately most programming languages have some kind of null pointer. We are now even at a point where some people claim that Tony Hoare’s famous billion dollar mistake costs actually a billion dollar per year.

But before we start to think about solutions to the null pointer problem let us first see where null values might come in handy.

Uninitialized values

In a statement oriented language like C# it is sometimes not that easy to represent uninitialized state.

As you can see we forgot to initialize peter in the missing "else-branch" which might lead to a NullReferenceException. There are a couple of things we can do to prevent this from happening. First of all we should omit the explicit initialization with null:

In this case the C# compiler throws an error telling us "Use of unassigned local variable ‘peter’".

In expression oriented languages like F# the problem doesn’t exist. We usually write initializations like this:

image

There is no way to forget the else branch since the types don’t match.

Unknown values

Consider a search function which tries to find a Person in a list:

Unknown values are probably the most common cause for the introduction of nulls and in contrast to uninitialized values they have much more global effects.

Solutions to unknown values

1. Using explicit exceptions

One easy solution to get rid of the nulls is to make the exception explicit:

One benefit here is that we have a concrete exception which is telling us what went wrong. Unfortunately nothing forces us to handle this exception in the calling method. This means the program can still crash. Another problem is that if we use try/catch as a control flow statement (i.e. use it very very often) then we might slow down our program.

And there is still a philosophical question: is it really an exception if we don’t have a person in our repository?

2. Using out parameters and returning bools

If we want to make the result of our search a little more explicit we can also introduce a boolean return value:

This is a pattern which is actually used everywhere in the .NET framework, so it must be good right?!

Just a simple question here: What did we gain exactly? If we forget to check for nulls why would we remember to check the bool?

There is another interesting observation here. Due to the introduction of out parameters we also introduce the uninitialized value problem in every calling method, which is bizarre.

3. Null object pattern

“In object-oriented computer programming, a Null Object is an object with defined neutral ("null") behavior. The Null Object design pattern describes the uses of such objects and their behavior (or lack thereof).”

Wikipedia

So obviously this makes only sense in a context where objects have observable behavior. So let’s add some behavior to our Person class:

Let’s look at this solution for a moment.

  • Pro: Implementation of missing behavior is trivial
  • Pro: We don’t introduce null values –> we won’t get NullReferenceExceptions
  • Pro: The name of the class carries information about the reason for the null value
  • Cons: In order to to get rid of the Person(string name, int age) constructor in the null-object we had to introduce an interface
  • Cons: In order to use the interface we had to modify the Person class. This might be a real problem if we don’t have access to the source. We would need some kind of ad-hoc polymorphism like Haskell’s type classes, Scala’s Traits or Clojure’s Protocols (read more about the expression problem)
  • Cons: Everything we want to do with Persons has to be part of the IPerson interface or we have to fall back to explicit runtime type tests, because there is no way to get to the data:

    image

  • Cons: Without ad-hoc polymorphism the Person class is getting more and more complex over time since we are adding all the behavior to it. Compare it with our starting point where it was a simple data representation. We totally lost that.
  • Cons: Errors/bugs might appear as normal program execution. [see Fowler, Martin (1999). Refactoring pp. 261]

Don’t use this approach it’s really not a good solution.

4. The Option type (a.k.a. Maybe monad)

The option type is a way to push the idea from 2. “returning bools” into the type system. There are lots of tutorials about the option type on the web, but for now it’s enough to know that it is something which is based on the following idea:

In order to allow pattern matching in C# we introduce a small helper:

With this idea we can get rid of all null values in the program, we don’t have to introduce an IPerson interface, the null case is type checked and the best thing is it’s really easy to create functions like IsOlderThan12:

Please don’t implement the option type yourself. Even in C# it’s much easier to just reference FSharp.Core.dll and use FSharpx (read 10 reasons to use the F# runtime in your C# app).

Of course this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you read more about the option type you will see that its monadic behavior allows all kinds of awesome applications (e.g. LINQ, folds, map, …).

5. The Either type

One of the benefits of the null object pattern above was that it allows to encode the reason for the missing value. In some cases we need the same thing for the maybe monad. So let’s try to capture the reason in the None case:

Now we can use this in the TryFindPerson method:

As with the option type please don’t rewrite this stuff yourself. There is a Choice type in F# which helps to capture this idea and Mauricio has a couple of blog posts which explain how to use it from C# (of course FSharpx is helping here again).

6. The (singleton) list monad

The option type captures the idea that we can either have one value or nothing. We can do the same thing with List<T>:

Of course this uses only a small subset of the power of IEnumerable<T> but I wanted to show the similarity to the maybe monad. You can read more about the “poor man’s option type” on Mauricio’s blog.

Conclusion

We saw a couple of very different solutions to get rid of null values. Normally I’d only use the option type or the either type (if I need to carry the reason). In some very rare situations (e.g. C# only projects) I would also use singleton lists.

I wouldn’t use the other solutions. They are potentially dangerous, especially if your project gets bigger.

I would be happy to read your opinions.

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