The Daily Parker

Posting day 17 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge just a little late because of stuff (see next post). Apologies.

Today's topic is querying, which .NET makes relatively easy through the magic of LINQ. Last week I showed how LINQ works when dealing with in-memory collections of things. In combination with Entity Framework, or another object-relational mapper (ORM), LINQ makes getting data out of your database a ton easier.

When querying a database in a .NET application, you will generally need a database connection object, a database command object, and a data reader. Here's a simple example using SQL Server:

public void DirectQueryExample(string connectionString)
{
	using (var conn = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
	{
		var command = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM LookupData", conn);
		conn.Open();
		var reader = command.ExecuteReader();
		foreach (var row in reader)
		{
			Console.WriteLine(reader[0]);
		}
	}
}

(Let's skip for now how bad it is to execute raw SQL from your application.)

With Entity Framework (or another ORM), the ORM generates classes that represent tables or views in your database. Imagine you have an animals table, represented by an animal class in your data project. Finding them in your database might now look like this:

public IEnumerable<Animal> OrmQueryExample(string species)
{
	var result = new List<Animal>();
	using (var db = Orm.Context)
	{
		var dtos = db.Animals.Where(p => p.Species == species);
		result.AddRange(dtos.ForEach(MapDtoToDomainObject));
	}

	return result;
}

private Animal MapDtoToDomainObject(AnimalDto animalDto)
{
	// Code elided
}

That looks a little different, no? Instead of opening a connection to the database and executing a query, we use a database context that Entity Framework supplies. We then execute a LINQ query directly on the Animals table representation with a predicate. The ORM handles constructing and executing the query, and returns an IQueryable<T> of its self-generated Animal data transfer object (DTO). When we get that collection back, we map the fields on the DTO to the domain object we want, and return an IEnumerable<T> of our own domain object back to the caller. If the query comes up empty, we return an empty list. (Here's a decent Stack Overflow post on the difference between the two collection types.)

These are naive examples, of course, and there are many other ways of using EF. For example, for field mapping we might use a package like AutoMapper instead of rolling our own field-level mapping. I encourage you to read up on EF and related technologies.

A couple stories of interest:

• CityLab has a good explanation about why New York stopped building subways 80 years ago, and how that has caused epic transit problems today.
• Developers plan to build a new skyscraper in Chicago for $1 bn. At 433 m, it would be the second-tallest building in Chicago, just 9 m shorter than Willis Tower.
• Credit-card signatures are finally going away in the U.S.

OK, back to being really too busy to breathe this week...

For day 15 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I want to talk about something that computer scientists use but application developers typically don't.

Longtime readers of the Daily Parker know that I put a lot of stock in having a liberal arts education in general, and having one in my profession in specific. I have a disclosed bias against hiring people with computer science (CS) degrees unless they come from universities with rigorous liberal arts core requirements. Distilled down to the essence, I believe that CS majors at most schools spend too much time on how computers work and not enough time on how people work.

But CS majors do have a lexicon that more liberally-educated developers don't really have. For example, when discussing how well code performs, CS majors use "Big O" notation.

In Big O notation, the O stands for "order of growth," meaning how much time could the algorithm could grow to take up given worst-case inputs.

The simplest notation is O(1), where the code always takes the same amount of time to execute no matter what the inputs are:

int q = 1;
int r = 2;
var s = q + r;

Adding two integers in .NET always takes the same amount of time, no matter what the integers are.

The titular notation for this post, O(n), means that the execution time grows linearly based on the input. Each item you add to the input increases the time the algorithm takes by exactly one unit, as in a simple for loop:

public long LoopExample(int[] numbers)
{
	long sum;
	for(var x = 0; x < numbers.Length; x++)
	{
		sum += numbers[x];
	}
	return sum;
}

In that example, each item you add to the array numbers increases the time the loop takes by exactly one unit of time, whatever that unit may be. (On most computers today that would be measured in units of milliseconds, or even hundreds of nanoseconds.)

Other algorithms may be slower or faster than these examples, except that no algorithm can be faster than O(1). The parenthetical can be any expression of n. Some algorithms grow by the logarithm of n, some grow by the double of n, some grow by the square of n.

This notation enables people to communicate precisely about how well code performs. If you find that your code takes O(n²) time to run, you may want to find a fix that reduces it to O(log n). And you can communicate to people how you increased efficiency in just that way.

So as much as I want application developers to have broad liberal educations, it's worth remembering that computer science fits into a liberal education as well.

Day 14 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings us to namespaces.

Simply put, a namespace puts logical scope around a group of types. In .NET and in other languages, types typically belong to namespaces two or three levels down.

Look at the sample code for this series. You'll notice that all of the types have a scope around them something like this:

namespace InnerDrive.Application.Module
{
}

(In some languages it's customary to use the complete domain name of the organization creating the code as part of the namespace and to use alternate letter cases. If I were writing Java, for example, that would look like com.inner-drive.application.module.)

Every type defined in the namespace belongs to only that namespace. If I defined a type in the example namespace above called Foo, the fully-qualified type name would be InnerDrive.Application.Module.Foo. Because using FQTNs requires a lot of typing and makes code harder to read, .NET gives you another use of the namespace keyword:

namespace InnerDrive.Application.Module;

namespace InnerDrive.Application.OtherModule
{
	public class Bar
	{
		public void Initialize() 
		{
			// var foo = new InnerDrive.Application.Module.Foo() is not required
			var foo = new Foo();
			foo.Start();
		}
	}
}

Also, that Bar class belongs only to the InnerDrive.Application.OtherModule namespace, so another developer could create another Bar class in her own namespace without needing to worry about mine.

Alphabetical order doesn't actually put topics in the best sequence for learning, so we've had to wait until Day 13 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge to talk about one of the most basic parts of an object-oriented program: methods.

A method takes a message from an object and does something with it. It's the behavior part of the behavior-plus-data pairing that orients your objects in the OO universe.

In .NET, even though you define fields, events, properties, and methods on your classes, under the hood the CLR sees only fields and methods. Properties and events are basically special flavors of methods that C# syntax makes easier to understand for humans. (See Monday's post.)

Take this simple C# snippet:

public string Name { get; internal set; }

The compiled code for that property will look almost the same as the compiled code for this pair of methods with a backing field:

public string get_Name()
{
	return _name;
}

internal void set_Name(string value)
{
	_name = value;
}

private string _name;

In fact, the method pair should look very familiar to Java developers, since that language hasn't really kept up with the times, you know? (Java developers would call the simplified version "syntactic sugar," which is what people call things that make life simpler when their salaries depend on it being complicated. It's essentially every argument a Rails developer has with her .NET counterpart until the first time she needs to decouple the database from the front end. That's when the .NET guy shows her a coding horror from the VB3 era with a mournful warning not to let this happen to her. But I digress.)

To sum up: Methods change the data or behavior of an object, but C# prefers that you use properties to change data, events to express behaviors to external consumers, and methods to ask the object to do something.

The A-to-Z challenge is off tomorrow, but it will return next week with a basic tool of organizing your software, a basic tool of performance testing, a basic principle of OO design, and three other posts I haven't thought about yet.

Of 19 Trump-branded product lines available in 2015, only 2 remain on the market. One wonders why:

In recent weeks, only two said they are still selling Trump-branded goods. One is a Panamanian company selling Trump bed linens and home goods. The other is a Turkish companyselling Trump furniture.

Of the rest, some Trump partners quit in reaction to campaign-trail rhetoric on immigrants and Muslims. Others said their licensing agreements had expired. Others said nothing beyond confirming that they’d stopped working with Trump. Their last Trump goods are now being sold off, often at a discount: One cologne is marked down from $42 to $9.99 for an ounce.

“Success by Trump,” the website says. And below that: “Clearance.”

“A caricature of what wealth is — as opposed to what real wealth is,” said Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, a consultant to luxury brands. Trump sold to those, he said, “who didn’t know the difference,” he said.

However, Pedraza said, Trump began to undermine his own success by “label-slapping” — sticking his name on anything he could, even the farfetched and ridiculous. Emeril Lagasse sold pots. Greg Norman sold golf shirts. Trump sold. . . everything.

“There was no strategy,” Pedraza said.

Seems like a strategy that could work, depending on your audience. Good thing we Americans have strong antibodies against charlatans.

Day 12 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge will introduce you to LINQ, another way .NET makes your life easier.

LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query, which Microsoft describes as follows:

Traditionally, queries against data are expressed as simple strings without type checking at compile time or IntelliSense support. Furthermore, you have to learn a different query language for each type of data source: SQL databases, XML documents, various Web services, and so on. With LINQ, a query is a first-class language construct, just like classes, methods, events.

LINQ does a lot of things, so let me show just a small example. Before LINQ, if you wanted to loop through a collection and filter for specific characteristics, you'd have to do something like this:

public static ICollection<Room> ForEachLooping(IEnumerable<Room> rooms, string filter)
{
	var result = new List<Room>();
	foreach (var item in rooms)
	{
		if (filter == item.Name) result.Add(item);
	}

	return result;
}

Here's the LINQ version; see if you can spot the difference:

public static ICollection<Room> LinqLooping(IEnumerable<Room> rooms, string filter)
{
	return rooms.Where(p => p.Name == filter).ToList();
}

LINQ adds a whole set of extension methods to the IEnumerable<T> interface, including Average, Sum, Sort, Join...basically, everything you can do with a SQL statement, you can do with a LINQ statement.

In fact, there's an alternate syntax that's even more SQL-like:

public static ICollection<Room> SqlishLinq(IEnumerable<Room> rooms, string filter)
{
	return
		(from r in rooms
		where r.Name == filter
		select r)
	.ToList();
}

Note that LINQ naturally operates on and returns IEnumerable<T>, not ICollection<T>, so I invoked the .ToList() method for easier testing. In fact you would want to return IEnumerable<T> so that you can easily chain methods that use LINQ, as LINQ doesn't evaluate the whole query chain until you try to use one of its results. Calling ToList() forces an invocation.

LINQ is super-powerful and super-handy in too many cases to enumerate* in this short post. But if you use ReSharper (see Tuesday's post), you will learn it super-quickly.

(* See what I did there?)

Eddie Lampert's reign of terror against Sears continued today when the chain announced the closing of their very last store in Chicago:

Sears, founded in Chicago and facing mounting troubles, is closing its last store in the city.

Employees at the store at Six Corners in the Old Irving Park neighborhood were told of the closure Thursday morning, spokesman Howard Riefs said in an email. The store will close in mid-July after a liquidation sale set to begin April 27. The Sears Auto Center will close in mid-May.

The store was one of 265 properties sold to Seritage Growth Properties in a 2015 sale-leaseback deal.

“For more than 120 years, Sears has called Illinois home and that is not changing,” Riefs said. “Although we are disappointed by this last store closure in Chicago, by no means does this change our commitment to our customers and presence to Chicago’s residents.”

Of course it doesn't change their commitment to Chicago; they haven't had one since 2005.

Howard, Eddie: I'm thinking of a phrase that ends with "...and the horse you rode in on."

Edward McClelland essays on the decline of the white blue-collar Midwest, as expressed linguistically:

The “classic Chicago” accent, with its elongated vowels and its tendency to substitute “dese, dem, and dose” for “these, them, and those,” or “chree” for “three,” was the voice of the city’s white working class. “Dese, Dem, and Dose Guy,” in fact, is a term for a certain type of down-to-earth Chicagoan, usually from a white South Side neighborhood or an inner-ring suburb.

The classic accent was most widespread during the city’s industrial heyday. Blue-collar work and strong regional speech are closely connected: If you were white and graduated high school in the 1960s, you didn’t need to go to college, or even leave your neighborhood, to get a good job, and once you got that job, you didn’t have to talk to anyone outside your house, your factory, or your tavern. A regular-joe accent was a sign of masculinity and local cred, bonding forces important for the teamwork of industrial labor.

The classic Chicago accent is heard less often these days because the white working class is less numerous, and less influential, than it was in the 20th century. It has been pushed to the margins of city life, both figuratively and geographically, by white flight, multiculturalism and globalization: The accent is most prevalent in blue-collar suburbs and predominantly white neighborhoods in the northwest and southwest corners of the city, now heavily populated by city workers whose families have lived in Chicago for generations.

There’s a conception that television leveled local accents, by bringing so-called “broadcaster English” into every home. I don’t think this is true. No one watched more television than the Baby Boomers, but their accents are much stronger than those of their children, the Millennials.

What’s really killing the local accent is education and geographicmobility, which became economic necessities for young Rust Belters after the mills closed down. But as blue-collar jobs have faded, so has some of our linguistic diversity.

McClelland adapted his CityLab essay from his 2016 book How to Speak Midwestern, which is obviously now on my Amazon wish list.

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge continues on Day 11 with key-value pairs and simple tuples.

A tuple is a finite ordered list of elements. In mathematics, you usually see them surrounded by parentheses and delineated with commas, like so: (2, 3, 5, 8, 13).

.NET has several generic Tuple classes with 2 through 7 items in the sequence, plus a KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue> structure that is the equivalent of Tuple<T1, T2>.

I'm actually not a fan of the Tuple class, though I get why it exists. I prefer naming things what they actually are or do. If you're doing mathematics and need a 3-item tuple, use Tuple<T1, T2, T3>. But if you're doing geography and you need a terrestrial coordinate, create an actual Node<Easting, Northing, Altitude> class and use that instead. (Or just add the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture from NuGet to your project and use mine.)

You probably can't avoid the KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue> structure, however. It's coupled to the Dictionary<TKey, TValue> class, which you will probably use frequently.

Example:

#region Copyright ©2018 Inner Drive Technology

using System.Collections.Generic;

#endregion

namespace InnerDrive.DailyParkerAtoZ.WeekOne
{
	public class KeyValuePairs
	{
		public void Add(string name, Room room)
		{
			_rooms.Add(name, room);
		}

		public Room Find(string name)
		{
			return _rooms.ContainsKey(name) ? _rooms[name] : null;
		}

		public void Remove(string name)
		{
			if (_rooms.ContainsKey(name)) _rooms.Remove(name);
		}
		
		private readonly Dictionary<string, Room> _rooms = new Dictionary<string, Room>();
	}
}

Under the hood, the Dictionary<string, Room> object uses KeyValuePair<string, Room> objects to give you a list of rooms. Note that the key must be unique inside the dictionary; you can't have two rooms called "cupboard under the stairs" or it will throw an exception. Also note the safety features in the code above: the demo class won't throw an exception if you try to find or remove a room that doesn't exist. (There's a philosophical question buried in there: why should or shouldn't it throw?)

As always, download and play with the code samples for more fun and enjoyment.