As Jason Zander shows on his blog, Visual Studio 2010 is looking gorgeous in its WPF kit. The added capabilities of the IDE and the power extensions now have will put this software above and beyond the rest for many years. If Microsoft still does one thing brilliantly, it is write great IDE software.
Knowing how frameworks are designed and developed definately has its benefits. Awhile ago I spent some time looking into how DependencyObject and DependencyProperty work in WPF. Essentially, many of the properties are not simple properties but rather facades for method invocations.
Fast forward to today when I was working on Versionator, an application I am writing to help me manage my many projects’ versions. The problem is that project information files (AssemblyInfo.cs) are not straight forward in terms of parsing. They are merely text files, awkward and malformed code files in fact. To be able to support many properties so easily, I came up with a scheme to parse, manage and save the projects’ properties in the file.
What I do is parse the properties, extracting the data and storing it in a dictionary as “old values.” At the same time I create a copy of the values in a “current values” dictionary. As new values come in, I channel them through properties, then Get and Set methods which access the “current values” dictionary. When it comes time to save I have to do some management of the data based on whether or not the property was empty, non-existant or is being changed to empty. It is simple to say that it would have taken me a lot longer if I had not taken a look at WPF. So was it a spark of genius? Or just plain old learnedness?
The Code (Beware of its massive length):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 | using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; namespace FocusedGames.Versionator.Data { public class ProjectInfo { public enum Properties : ushort { Title = 0, Description = 1, Company = 2, Product = 3, Copyright = 4, Trademark = 5, AssemblyVersion = 6, FileVersion = 7, Guid = 8 } private readonly string[] lookups = new [] { "AssemblyTitle", "AssemblyDescription", "AssemblyCompany", "AssemblyProduct", "AssemblyCopyright", "AssemblyTrademark", "AssemblyVersion", "AssemblyFileVersion", "Guid" }; private readonly Dictionary<ushort, string> propertyValues = new Dictionary<ushort, string>(); private readonly Dictionary<ushort, string> oldValues = new Dictionary<ushort, string>(); public static ProjectInfo FromFile(string filename) { return new ProjectInfo(filename); } public ProjectInfo() { Array enumValues = Enum.GetValues(typeof (Properties)); foreach(ushort prop in enumValues) { propertyValues.Add(prop, string.Empty); oldValues.Add(prop, string.Empty); } } public ProjectInfo(string filename) : this() { Load(filename); } #region Getting and Setting Project Properties protected void SetProperty(Properties prop, string value) { propertyValues[(ushort) prop] = value; } protected string GetProperty(Properties prop) { string newValue = propertyValues[(ushort) prop]; if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(newValue)) return oldValues[(ushort) prop]; return newValue; } #endregion #region Loading and Saving public void Load(string filename) { Filename = filename; string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines(Filename); Array enumValues = Enum.GetValues(typeof (Properties)); foreach(ushort prop in enumValues) { Load(lines, prop); } } private void Load(string[] lines, ushort lookup) { for(int i = 0; i < lines.Length; i++) { string currentLine = lines[i]; string searchTerm = lookups[lookup]; // Get the first index of the search term int firstIndex = currentLine.IndexOf(searchTerm); // The property wasn't found, continue // through the file. if(firstIndex == -1) continue; // Now we need to extract the data out of the string! string data = currentLine.Substring(firstIndex + searchTerm.Length).TrimFront("\"").TrimBack("\""); oldValues[lookup] = data; propertyValues[lookup] = data; } } public void Save() { string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines(Filename); Array enumValues = Enum.GetValues(typeof(Properties)); foreach (ushort prop in enumValues) Save(lines, prop); StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(Filename, false); for(int i = 0; i < lines.Length; i++) sw.WriteLine(lines[i]); sw.Close(); } private void Save(string[] lines, ushort prop) { for (int i = 0; i < lines.Length; i++) { string currentLine = lines[i]; string searchTerm = lookups[prop]; // Get the first index of the search term int firstIndex = currentLine.IndexOf(searchTerm); // The property wasn't found, continue // through the file. if (firstIndex == -1) continue; string oldValueLocal = oldValues[prop]; string newValueLocal = propertyValues[prop]; // If the old value didn't exist, we can adjust the // replacement mechanism to remove the "" and add // them back in. if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(oldValueLocal)) { oldValueLocal = "\"\""; newValueLocal = string.Format("\"{0}\"", newValueLocal); } // We also need to catch people emptying strings out. // To do this we adjust the saving mechanism the same way. if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(newValueLocal)) { oldValueLocal = string.Format("\"{0}\"", oldValueLocal); newValueLocal = "\"\""; } // Replace the old value with the new value if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(newValueLocal)) lines[i] = lines[i].Replace(oldValueLocal, newValueLocal); } } #endregion public string Filename { get; private set; } public string AssemblyVersion { get { return GetProperty(Properties.AssemblyVersion); } set { SetProperty(Properties.AssemblyVersion, value); } } public string FileVersion { get { return GetProperty(Properties.FileVersion); } set { SetProperty(Properties.FileVersion, value); } } public string Title { get { return GetProperty(Properties.Title); } set { SetProperty(Properties.Title, value); } } public string Description { get { return GetProperty(Properties.Description); } set { SetProperty(Properties.Description, value); } } public string Company { get { return GetProperty(Properties.Company); } set { SetProperty(Properties.Company, value); } } public string Product { get { return GetProperty(Properties.Product); } set { SetProperty(Properties.Product, value); } } public string Copyright { get { return GetProperty(Properties.Copyright); } set { SetProperty(Properties.Copyright, value); } } public string Trademark { get { return GetProperty(Properties.Trademark); } set { SetProperty(Properties.Trademark, value); } } public string Guid { get { return GetProperty(Properties.Guid); } set { SetProperty(Properties.Guid, value); } } } } |
P.S. The code is not done, is not even close to being efficient or functionally complete. But it works!
With the arrival of .NET 3.5 and consequently WPF applications, Microsoft has done away with the old Application WinForms class. No longer can you call Application.LocalUserAppDataPath to get where the user’s files are stored. To restore this functionality as well as add a bit more, I have tapped into an uncommon resource: extension methods. Let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?