PowerShell and GTK-Server

Another little five-finger exercise, porting the example VBScript stdin driver to PowerShell. The only annoying thing is that the Start-Process cmdlet doesn't give you direct access to the streams, so we have to drop into .net to fire up the GTK server process.

Another PowerShell egg-timer (using events)

Recording a learning exercise for how PowerShell handles events, and how to communicate into event handlers

Note that every registered event must be unregistered (otherwise running the script leaves droppings in your PowerShell session in the form of those claims on events). The events that are handled -- the timer 250ms wake-ups -- are consumed by being handled; but the one that is merely waited on remains latched after triggering the wait to release and must be explicitly cleared.

Additional AV frills would be the same as any of the polling loop timer examples out there.

C# : The null object pattern and the poor man's Maybe Monad

Lots of people have re-invented the Maybe monad in C#, as a simple search will show, usually as a way of bypassing null checking if statements and to be able to write code like

But we have the tools given to us already if we observe that null has no type -- as we can see when

reports a length of zero!

So our Some<T> is just a length-1 IEnumerable<T>; and None<T> an empty one -- the null object pattern, in fact.

For the price of having to specify types at each stage -- as we would anyway have had to in the past for declaring intermediate the values to test against null -- we can use existing methods to finesse the null check. Returning to the borrowed example, it would be

The monadic return monad extraction operation is just FirstOrDefault(); which is fine for reference types. Value types are different in any case as we wouldn't be null checking those -- as the later steps in a chain though, stopping at the filtering to the value type and making an Any test may be preferred.

Looking at value types, switching to this example, the code looks like:

which leaks a little bit in that we have to do the monadic return monad extraction by hand at the end, but otherwise behaves exactly as the explicit monad implementation.