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• The Great Divorce

  - by BlackRabbitCoder

  I have a confession to make: I've been in an abusive relationship for more than 17 years now.  Yes, I am not ashamed to admit it, but I'm finally doing something about it. I met her in college, she was new and sexy and amazingly fast -- and I'd never met anything like her before.  Her style and her power captivated me and I couldn't wait to learn more about her.  I took a chance on her, and though I learned a lot from her -- and will always be grateful for my time with her -- I think it's time to move on. Her name was C++, and she so outshone my previous love, C, that any thoughts of going back evaporated in the heat of this new romance.  She promised me she'd be gentle and not hurt me the way C did.  She promised me she'd clean-up after herself better than C did.  She promised me she'd be less enigmatic and easier to keep happy than C was.  But I was deceived.  Oh sure, as far as truth goes, it wasn't a complete lie.  To some extent she was more fun, more powerful, safer, and easier to maintain.  But it just wasn't good enough -- or at least it's not good enough now. I loved C++, some part of me still does, it's my first-love of programming languages and I recognize its raw power, its blazing speed, and its improvements over its predecessor.  But with today's hardware, at speeds we could only dream to conceive of twenty years ago, that need for speed -- at the cost of all else -- has died, and that has left my feelings for C++ moribund. If I ever need to write an operating system or a device driver, then I might need that speed.  But 99% of the time I don't.  I'm a business-type programmer and chances are 90% of you are too, and even the ones who need speed at all costs may be surprised by how much you sacrifice for that.   That's not to say that I don't want my software to perform, and it's not to say that in the business world we don't care about speed or that our job is somehow less difficult or technical.  There's many times we write programs to handle millions of real-time updates or handle thousands of financial transactions or tracking trading algorithms where every second counts.  But if I choose to write my code in C++ purely for speed chances are I'll never notice the speed increase -- and equally true chances are it will be far more prone to crash and far less easy to maintain.  Nearly without fail, it's the macro-optimizations you need, not the micro-optimizations.  If I choose to write a O(n2) algorithm when I could have used a O(n) algorithm -- that can kill me.  If I choose to go to the database to load a piece of unchanging data every time instead of caching it on first load -- that too can kill me.  And if I cross the network multiple times for pieces of data instead of getting it all at once -- yes that can also kill me.  But choosing an overly powerful and dangerous mid-level language to squeeze out every last drop of performance will realistically not make stock orders process any faster, and more likely than not open up the system to more risk of crashes and resource leaks. And that's when my love for C++ began to die.  When I noticed that I didn't need that speed anymore.  That that speed was really kind of a lie.  Sure, I can be super efficient and pack bits in a byte instead of using separate boolean values.  Sure, I can use an unsigned char instead of an int.  But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter as much as you think it does.  The key is maintainability, and that's where C++ failed me.  I like to tell the other developers I work with that there's two levels of correctness in coding: Is it immediately correct? Will it stay correct? That is, you can hack together any piece of code and make it correct to satisfy a task at hand, but if a new developer can't come in tomorrow and make a fairly significant change to it without jeopardizing that correctness, it won't stay correct. Some people laugh at me when I say I now prefer maintainability over speed.  But that is exactly the point.  If you focus solely on speed you tend to produce code that is much harder to maintain over the long hall, and that's a load of technical debt most shops can't afford to carry and end up completely scrapping code before it's time.  When good code is written well for maintainability, though, it can be correct both now and in the future. And you know the best part is?  My new love is nearly as fast as C++, and in some cases even faster -- and better than that, I know C# will treat me right.  Her creators have poured hundreds of thousands of hours of time into making her the sexy beast she is today.  They made her easy to understand and not an enigmatic mess.  They made her consistent and not moody and amorphous.  And they made her perform as fast as I care to go by optimizing her both at compile time and a run-time. Her code is so elegant and easy on the eyes that I'm not worried where she will run to or what she'll pull behind my back.  She is powerful enough to handle all my tasks, fast enough to execute them with blazing speed, maintainable enough so that I can rely on even fairly new peers to modify my work, and rich enough to allow me to satisfy any need.  C# doesn't ask me to clean up her messes!  She cleans up after herself and she tries to make my life easier for me by taking on most of those optimization tasks C++ asked me to take upon myself.  Now, there are many of you who would say that I am the cause of my own grief, that it was my fault C++ didn't behave because I didn't pay enough attention to her.  That I alone caused the pain she inflicted on me.  And to some extent, you have a point.  But she was so high maintenance, requiring me to know every twist and turn of her vast and unrestrained power that any wrong term or bout of forgetfulness was met with painful reminders that she wasn't going to watch my back when I made a mistake.  But C#, she loves me when I'm good, and she loves me when I'm bad, and together we make beautiful code that is both fast and safe. So that's why I'm leaving C++ behind.  She says she's changing for me, but I have no interest in what C++0x may bring.  Oh, I'll still keep in touch, and maybe I'll see her now and again when she brings her problems to my door and asks for some attention -- for I always have a soft spot for her, you see.  But she's out of my house now.  I have three kids and a dog and a cat, and all require me to clean up after them, why should I have to clean up after my programming language as well?

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• Christmas in the Clouds

  - by andrewbrust

  I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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• NUMA-aware placement of communication variables

  - by Dave

  For classic NUMA-aware programming I'm typically most concerned about simple cold, capacity and compulsory misses and whether we can satisfy the miss by locally connected memory or whether we have to pull the line from its home node over the coherent interconnect -- we'd like to minimize channel contention and conserve interconnect bandwidth. That is, for this style of programming we're quite aware of where memory is homed relative to the threads that will be accessing it. Ideally, a page is collocated on the node with the thread that's expected to most frequently access the page, as simple misses on the page can be satisfied without resorting to transferring the line over the interconnect. The default "first touch" NUMA page placement policy tends to work reasonable well in this regard. When a virtual page is first accessed, the operating system will attempt to provision and map that virtual page to a physical page allocated from the node where the accessing thread is running. It's worth noting that the node-level memory interleaving granularity is usually a multiple of the page size, so we can say that a given page P resides on some node N. That is, the memory underlying a page resides on just one node. But when thinking about accesses to heavily-written communication variables we normally consider what caches the lines underlying such variables might be resident in, and in what states. We want to minimize coherence misses and cache probe activity and interconnect traffic in general. I don't usually give much thought to the location of the home NUMA node underlying such highly shared variables. On a SPARC T5440, for instance, which consists of 4 T2+ processors connected by a central coherence hub, the home node and placement of heavily accessed communication variables has very little impact on performance. The variables are frequently accessed so likely in M-state in some cache, and the location of the home node is of little consequence because a requester can use cache-to-cache transfers to get the line. Or at least that's what I thought. Recently, though, I was exploring a simple shared memory point-to-point communication model where a client writes a request into a request mailbox and then busy-waits on a response variable. It's a simple example of delegation based on message passing. The server polls the request mailbox, and having fetched a new request value, performs some operation and then writes a reply value into the response variable. As noted above, on a T5440 performance is insensitive to the placement of the communication variables -- the request and response mailbox words. But on a Sun/Oracle X4800 I noticed that was not the case and that NUMA placement of the communication variables was actually quite important. For background an X4800 system consists of 8 Intel X7560 Xeons . Each package (socket) has 8 cores with 2 contexts per core, so the system is 8x8x2. Each package is also a NUMA node and has locally attached memory. Every package has 3 point-to-point QPI links for cache coherence, and the system is configured with a twisted ladder "mobius" topology. The cache coherence fabric is glueless -- there's not central arbiter or coherence hub. The maximum distance between any two nodes is just 2 hops over the QPI links. For any given node, 3 other nodes are 1 hop distant and the remaining 4 nodes are 2 hops distant. Using a single request (client) thread and a single response (server) thread, a benchmark harness explored all permutations of NUMA placement for the two threads and the two communication variables, measuring the average round-trip-time and throughput rate between the client and server. In this benchmark the server simply acts as a simple transponder, writing the request value plus 1 back into the reply field, so there's no particular computation phase and we're only measuring communication overheads. In addition to varying the placement of communication variables over pairs of nodes, we also explored variations where both variables were placed on one page (and thus on one node) -- either on the same cache line or different cache lines -- while varying the node where the variables reside along with the placement of the threads. The key observation was that if the client and server threads were on different nodes, then the best placement of variables was to have the request variable (written by the client and read by the server) reside on the same node as the client thread, and to place the response variable (written by the server and read by the client) on the same node as the server. That is, if you have a variable that's to be written by one thread and read by another, it should be homed with the writer thread. For our simple client-server model that means using split request and response communication variables with unidirectional message flow on a given page. This can yield up to twice the throughput of less favorable placement strategies. Our X4800 uses the QPI 1.0 protocol with source-based snooping. Briefly, when node A needs to probe a cache line it fires off snoop requests to all the nodes in the system. Those recipients then forward their response not to the original requester, but to the home node H of the cache line. H waits for and collects the responses, adjudicates and resolves conflicts and ensures memory-model ordering, and then sends a definitive reply back to the original requester A. If some node B needed to transfer the line to A, it will do so by cache-to-cache transfer and let H know about the disposition of the cache line. A needs to wait for the authoritative response from H. So if a thread on node A wants to write a value to be read by a thread on node B, the latency is dependent on the distances between A, B, and H. We observe the best performance when the written-to variable is co-homed with the writer A. That is, we want H and A to be the same node, as the writer doesn't need the home to respond over the QPI link, as the writer and the home reside on the very same node. With architecturally informed placement of communication variables we eliminate at least one QPI hop from the critical path. Newer Intel processors use the QPI 1.1 coherence protocol with home-based snooping. As noted above, under source-snooping a requester broadcasts snoop requests to all nodes. Those nodes send their response to the home node of the location, which provides memory ordering, reconciles conflicts, etc., and then posts a definitive reply to the requester. In home-based snooping the snoop probe goes directly to the home node and are not broadcast. The home node can consult snoop filters -- if present -- and send out requests to retrieve the line if necessary. The 3rd party owner of the line, if any, can respond either to the home or the original requester (or even to both) according to the protocol policies. There are myriad variations that have been implemented, and unfortunately vendor terminology doesn't always agree between vendors or with the academic taxonomy papers. The key is that home-snooping enables the use of a snoop filter to reduce interconnect traffic. And while home-snooping might have a longer critical path (latency) than source-based snooping, it also may require fewer messages and less overall bandwidth. It'll be interesting to reprise these experiments on a platform with home-based snooping. While collecting data I also noticed that there are placement concerns even in the seemingly trivial case when both threads and both variables reside on a single node. Internally, the cores on each X7560 package are connected by an internal ring. (Actually there are multiple contra-rotating rings). And the last-level on-chip cache (LLC) is partitioned in banks or slices, which with each slice being associated with a core on the ring topology. A hardware hash function associates each physical address with a specific home bank. Thus we face distance and topology concerns even for intra-package communications, although the latencies are not nearly the magnitude we see inter-package. I've not seen such communication distance artifacts on the T2+, where the cache banks are connected to the cores via a high-speed crossbar instead of a ring -- communication latencies seem more regular.

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• Corsair Hackers Reboot

  It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

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• PostSharp, Obfuscation, and IL

  - by Simon Cooper

  Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a relatively new programming paradigm. Originating at Xerox PARC in 1994, the paradigm was first made available for general-purpose development as an extension to Java in 2001. From there, it has quickly been adapted for use in all the common languages used today. In the .NET world, one of the primary AOP toolkits is PostSharp. Attributes and AOP Normally, attributes in .NET are entirely a metadata construct. Apart from a few special attributes in the .NET framework, they have no effect whatsoever on how a class or method executes within the CLR. Only by using reflection at runtime can you access any attributes declared on a type or type member. PostSharp changes this. By declaring a custom attribute that derives from PostSharp.Aspects.Aspect, applying it to types and type members, and running the resulting assembly through the PostSharp postprocessor, you can essentially declare 'clever' attributes that change the behaviour of whatever the aspect has been applied to at runtime. A simple example of this is logging. By declaring a TraceAttribute that derives from OnMethodBoundaryAspect, you can automatically log when a method has been executed: public class TraceAttribute : PostSharp.Aspects.OnMethodBoundaryAspect { public override void OnEntry(MethodExecutionArgs args) { MethodBase method = args.Method; System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine( String.Format( "Entering {0}.{1}.", method.DeclaringType.FullName, method.Name)); } public override void OnExit(MethodExecutionArgs args) { MethodBase method = args.Method; System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine( String.Format( "Leaving {0}.{1}.", method.DeclaringType.FullName, method.Name)); } } [Trace] public void MethodToLog() { ... } Now, whenever MethodToLog is executed, the aspect will automatically log entry and exit, without having to add the logging code to MethodToLog itself. PostSharp Performance Now this does introduce a performance overhead - as you can see, the aspect allows access to the MethodBase of the method the aspect has been applied to. If you were limited to C#, you would be forced to retrieve each MethodBase instance using Type.GetMethod(), matching on the method name and signature. This is slow. Fortunately, PostSharp is not limited to C#. It can use any instruction available in IL. And in IL, you can do some very neat things. Ldtoken C# allows you to get the Type object corresponding to a specific type name using the typeof operator: Type t = typeof(Random); The C# compiler compiles this operator to the following IL: ldtoken [mscorlib]System.Random call class [mscorlib]System.Type [mscorlib]System.Type::GetTypeFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeTypeHandle) The ldtoken instruction obtains a special handle to a type called a RuntimeTypeHandle, and from that, the Type object can be obtained using GetTypeFromHandle. These are both relatively fast operations - no string lookup is required, only direct assembly and CLR constructs are used. However, a little-known feature is that ldtoken is not just limited to types; it can also get information on methods and fields, encapsulated in a RuntimeMethodHandle or RuntimeFieldHandle: // get a MethodBase for String.EndsWith(string) ldtoken method instance bool [mscorlib]System.String::EndsWith(string) call class [mscorlib]System.Reflection.MethodBase [mscorlib]System.Reflection.MethodBase::GetMethodFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeMethodHandle) // get a FieldInfo for the String.Empty field ldtoken field string [mscorlib]System.String::Empty call class [mscorlib]System.Reflection.FieldInfo [mscorlib]System.Reflection.FieldInfo::GetFieldFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeFieldHandle) These usages of ldtoken aren't usable from C# or VB, and aren't likely to be added anytime soon (Eric Lippert's done a blog post on the possibility of adding infoof, methodof or fieldof operators to C#). However, PostSharp deals directly with IL, and so can use ldtoken to get MethodBase objects quickly and cheaply, without having to resort to string lookups. The kicker However, there are problems. Because ldtoken for methods or fields isn't accessible from C# or VB, it hasn't been as well-tested as ldtoken for types. This has resulted in various obscure bugs in most versions of the CLR when dealing with ldtoken and methods, and specifically, generic methods and methods of generic types. This means that PostSharp was behaving incorrectly, or just plain crashing, when aspects were applied to methods that were generic in some way. So, PostSharp has to work around this. Without using the metadata tokens directly, the only way to get the MethodBase of generic methods is to use reflection: Type.GetMethod(), passing in the method name as a string along with information on the signature. Now, this works fine. It's slower than using ldtoken directly, but it works, and this only has to be done for generic methods. Unfortunately, this poses problems when the assembly is obfuscated. PostSharp and Obfuscation When using ldtoken, obfuscators don't affect how PostSharp operates. Because the ldtoken instruction directly references the type, method or field within the assembly, it is unaffected if the name of the object is changed by an obfuscator. However, the indirect loading used for generic methods was breaking, because that uses the name of the method when the assembly is put through the PostSharp postprocessor to lookup the MethodBase at runtime. If the name then changes, PostSharp can't find it anymore, and the assembly breaks. So, PostSharp needs to know about any changes an obfuscator does to an assembly. The way PostSharp does this is by adding another layer of indirection. When PostSharp obfuscation support is enabled, it includes an extra 'name table' resource in the assembly, consisting of a series of method & type names. When PostSharp needs to lookup a method using reflection, instead of encoding the method name directly, it looks up the method name at a fixed offset inside that name table: MethodBase genericMethod = typeof(ContainingClass).GetMethod(GetNameAtIndex(22)); PostSharp.NameTable resource: ... 20: get_Prop1 21: set_Prop1 22: DoFoo 23: GetWibble When the assembly is later processed by an obfuscator, the obfuscator can replace all the method and type names within the name table with their new name. That way, the reflection lookups performed by PostSharp will now use the new names, and everything will work as expected: MethodBase genericMethod = typeof(#kGy).GetMethod(GetNameAtIndex(22)); PostSharp.NameTable resource: ... 20: #kkA 21: #zAb 22: #EF5a 23: #2tg As you can see, this requires direct support by an obfuscator in order to perform these rewrites. Dotfuscator supports it, and now, starting with SmartAssembly 6.6.4, SmartAssembly does too. So, a relatively simple solution to a tricky problem, with some CLR bugs thrown in for good measure. You don't see those every day!

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• PostSharp, Obfuscation, and IL

  - by simonc

  Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a relatively new programming paradigm. Originating at Xerox PARC in 1994, the paradigm was first made available for general-purpose development as an extension to Java in 2001. From there, it has quickly been adapted for use in all the common languages used today. In the .NET world, one of the primary AOP toolkits is PostSharp. Attributes and AOP Normally, attributes in .NET are entirely a metadata construct. Apart from a few special attributes in the .NET framework, they have no effect whatsoever on how a class or method executes within the CLR. Only by using reflection at runtime can you access any attributes declared on a type or type member. PostSharp changes this. By declaring a custom attribute that derives from PostSharp.Aspects.Aspect, applying it to types and type members, and running the resulting assembly through the PostSharp postprocessor, you can essentially declare 'clever' attributes that change the behaviour of whatever the aspect has been applied to at runtime. A simple example of this is logging. By declaring a TraceAttribute that derives from OnMethodBoundaryAspect, you can automatically log when a method has been executed: public class TraceAttribute : PostSharp.Aspects.OnMethodBoundaryAspect { public override void OnEntry(MethodExecutionArgs args) { MethodBase method = args.Method; System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine( String.Format( "Entering {0}.{1}.", method.DeclaringType.FullName, method.Name)); } public override void OnExit(MethodExecutionArgs args) { MethodBase method = args.Method; System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine( String.Format( "Leaving {0}.{1}.", method.DeclaringType.FullName, method.Name)); } } [Trace] public void MethodToLog() { ... } Now, whenever MethodToLog is executed, the aspect will automatically log entry and exit, without having to add the logging code to MethodToLog itself. PostSharp Performance Now this does introduce a performance overhead - as you can see, the aspect allows access to the MethodBase of the method the aspect has been applied to. If you were limited to C#, you would be forced to retrieve each MethodBase instance using Type.GetMethod(), matching on the method name and signature. This is slow. Fortunately, PostSharp is not limited to C#. It can use any instruction available in IL. And in IL, you can do some very neat things. Ldtoken C# allows you to get the Type object corresponding to a specific type name using the typeof operator: Type t = typeof(Random); The C# compiler compiles this operator to the following IL: ldtoken [mscorlib]System.Random call class [mscorlib]System.Type [mscorlib]System.Type::GetTypeFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeTypeHandle) The ldtoken instruction obtains a special handle to a type called a RuntimeTypeHandle, and from that, the Type object can be obtained using GetTypeFromHandle. These are both relatively fast operations - no string lookup is required, only direct assembly and CLR constructs are used. However, a little-known feature is that ldtoken is not just limited to types; it can also get information on methods and fields, encapsulated in a RuntimeMethodHandle or RuntimeFieldHandle: // get a MethodBase for String.EndsWith(string) ldtoken method instance bool [mscorlib]System.String::EndsWith(string) call class [mscorlib]System.Reflection.MethodBase [mscorlib]System.Reflection.MethodBase::GetMethodFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeMethodHandle) // get a FieldInfo for the String.Empty field ldtoken field string [mscorlib]System.String::Empty call class [mscorlib]System.Reflection.FieldInfo [mscorlib]System.Reflection.FieldInfo::GetFieldFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeFieldHandle) These usages of ldtoken aren't usable from C# or VB, and aren't likely to be added anytime soon (Eric Lippert's done a blog post on the possibility of adding infoof, methodof or fieldof operators to C#). However, PostSharp deals directly with IL, and so can use ldtoken to get MethodBase objects quickly and cheaply, without having to resort to string lookups. The kicker However, there are problems. Because ldtoken for methods or fields isn't accessible from C# or VB, it hasn't been as well-tested as ldtoken for types. This has resulted in various obscure bugs in most versions of the CLR when dealing with ldtoken and methods, and specifically, generic methods and methods of generic types. This means that PostSharp was behaving incorrectly, or just plain crashing, when aspects were applied to methods that were generic in some way. So, PostSharp has to work around this. Without using the metadata tokens directly, the only way to get the MethodBase of generic methods is to use reflection: Type.GetMethod(), passing in the method name as a string along with information on the signature. Now, this works fine. It's slower than using ldtoken directly, but it works, and this only has to be done for generic methods. Unfortunately, this poses problems when the assembly is obfuscated. PostSharp and Obfuscation When using ldtoken, obfuscators don't affect how PostSharp operates. Because the ldtoken instruction directly references the type, method or field within the assembly, it is unaffected if the name of the object is changed by an obfuscator. However, the indirect loading used for generic methods was breaking, because that uses the name of the method when the assembly is put through the PostSharp postprocessor to lookup the MethodBase at runtime. If the name then changes, PostSharp can't find it anymore, and the assembly breaks. So, PostSharp needs to know about any changes an obfuscator does to an assembly. The way PostSharp does this is by adding another layer of indirection. When PostSharp obfuscation support is enabled, it includes an extra 'name table' resource in the assembly, consisting of a series of method & type names. When PostSharp needs to lookup a method using reflection, instead of encoding the method name directly, it looks up the method name at a fixed offset inside that name table: MethodBase genericMethod = typeof(ContainingClass).GetMethod(GetNameAtIndex(22)); PostSharp.NameTable resource: ... 20: get_Prop1 21: set_Prop1 22: DoFoo 23: GetWibble When the assembly is later processed by an obfuscator, the obfuscator can replace all the method and type names within the name table with their new name. That way, the reflection lookups performed by PostSharp will now use the new names, and everything will work as expected: MethodBase genericMethod = typeof(#kGy).GetMethod(GetNameAtIndex(22)); PostSharp.NameTable resource: ... 20: #kkA 21: #zAb 22: #EF5a 23: #2tg As you can see, this requires direct support by an obfuscator in order to perform these rewrites. Dotfuscator supports it, and now, starting with SmartAssembly 6.6.4, SmartAssembly does too. So, a relatively simple solution to a tricky problem, with some CLR bugs thrown in for good measure. You don't see those every day! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Super constructor must be a first statement in Java constructor [closed]

  - by Val

  I know the answer: "we need rules to prevent shooting into your own foot". Ok, I make millions of programming mistakes every day. To be prevented, we need one simple rule: prohibit all JLS and do not use Java. If we explain everything by "not shooting your foot", this is reasonable. But there is not much reason is such reason. When I programmed in Delphy, I always wanted the compiler to check me if I read uninitializable. I have discovered myself that is is stupid to read uncertain variable because it leads unpredictable result and is errorenous obviously. By just looking at the code I could see if there is an error. I wished if compiler could do this job. It is also a reliable signal of programming error if function does not return any value. But I never wanted it do enforce me the super constructor first. Why? You say that constructors just initialize fields. Super fields are derived; extra fields are introduced. From the goal point of view, it does not matter in which order you initialize the variables. I have studied parallel architectures and can say that all the fields can even be assigned in parallel... What? Do you want to use the unitialized fields? Stupid people always want to take away our freedoms and break the JLS rules the God gives to us! Please, policeman, take away that person! Where do I say so? I'm just saying only about initializing/assigning, not using the fields. Java compiler already defends me from the mistake of accessing notinitialized. Some cases sneak but this example shows how this stupid rule does not save us from the read-accessing incompletely initialized in construction: public class BadSuper { String field; public String toString() { return "field = " + field; } public BadSuper(String val) { field = val; // yea, superfirst does not protect from accessing // inconstructed subclass fields. Subclass constr // must be called before super()! System.err.println(this); } } public class BadPost extends BadSuper { Object o; public BadPost(Object o) { super("str"); this. o = o; } public String toString() { // superconstructor will boom here, because o is not initialized! return super.toString() + ", obj = " + o.toString(); } public static void main(String[] args) { new BadSuper("test 1"); new BadPost(new Object()); } } It shows that actually, subfields have to be inilialized before the supreclass! Meantime, java requirement "saves" us from writing specializing the class by specializing what the super constructor argument is, public class MyKryo extends Kryo { class MyClassResolver extends DefaultClassResolver { public Registration register(Registration registration) { System.out.println(MyKryo.this.getDepth()); return super.register(registration); } } MyKryo() { // cannot instantiate MyClassResolver in super super(new MyClassResolver(), new MapReferenceResolver()); } } Try to make it compilable. It is always pain. Especially, when you cannot assign the argument later. Initialization order is not important for initialization in general. I could understand that you should not use super methods before initializing super. But, the requirement for super to be the first statement is different. It only saves you from the code that does useful things simply. I do not see how this adds safety. Actually, safety is degraded because we need to use ugly workarounds. Doing post-initialization, outside the constructors also degrades safety (otherwise, why do we need constructors?) and defeats the java final safety reenforcer. To conclude Reading not initialized is a bug. Initialization order is not important from the computer science point of view. Doing initalization or computations in different order is not a bug. Reenforcing read-access to not initialized is good but compilers fail to detect all such bugs Making super the first does not solve the problem as it "Prevents" shooting into right things but not into the foot It requires to invent workarounds, where, because of complexity of analysis, it is easier to shoot into the foot doing post-initialization outside the constructors degrades safety (otherwise, why do we need constructors?) and that degrade safety by defeating final access modifier When there was java forum alive, java bigots attecked me for these thoughts. Particularly, they dislaked that fields can be initialized in parallel, saying that natural development ensures correctness. When I replied that you could use an advanced engineering to create a human right away, without "developing" any ape first, and it still be an ape, they stopped to listen me. Cos modern technology cannot afford it. Ok, Take something simpler. How do you produce a Renault? Should you construct an Automobile first? No, you start by producing a Renault and, once completed, you'll see that this is an automobile. So, the requirement to produce fields in "natural order" is unnatural. In case of alarmclock or armchair, which are still chair and clock, you may need first develop the base (clock and chair) and then add extra. So, I can have examples where superfields must be initialized first and, oppositely, when they need to be initialized later. The order does not exist in advance. So, the compiler cannot be aware of the proper order. Only programmer/constructor knows is. Compiler should not take more responsibility and enforce the wrong order onto programmer. Saying that I cannot initialize some fields because I did not ininialized the others is like "you cannot initialize the thing because it is not initialized". This is a kind of argument we have. So, to conclude once more, the feature that "protects" me from doing things in simple and right way in order to enforce something that does not add noticeably to the bug elimination at that is a strongly negative thing and it pisses me off, altogether with the all the arguments to support it I've seen so far. It is "a conceptual question about software development" Should there be the requirement to call super() first or not. I do not know. If you do or have an idea, you have place to answer. I think that I have provided enough arguments against this feature. Lets appreciate the ones who benefit form it. Let it just be something more than simple abstract and stupid "write your own language" or "protection" kind of argument. Why do we need it in the language that I am going to develop?

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• OS choice between: Debian, gNewSense, and OpenSolaris

  - by penyuan

  I am planning to migrate from Mac OS X and Windows to either a Unix or Linux distribution, i.e. I am a Linux/Unix beginner. Right now the following caught my interest: Debian: Well established with huge repository of 20000+ apps. gNewSence: "Totally free" version of Ubuntu, so it should be more beginner friendly? OpenSolaris: Also open-source, and built on "strong" Unix base. I do mainly basic tasks such as web browsing, office work, maintaining big photo collection, and a little bit of programming. Questions: How "free" are each of these distributions compared to each other, is this whole freedom thing a big deal? Will a binary labeled as for Ubuntu work on gNewSense? What are simple IDEs for Debian and gNewSense?

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• rename file names from lower case to upper case

  - by Adnan

  Hello, I have about 2k of file that are currently in lower case like: file_one.cfr file_two.cfr .... I am searching for a fast way to rename them to upper case so they would be like; FILE_ONE.cfr FILE_TWO.cfr .... If I use from my shell; for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | tr [:lower:] [:upper:]`; done I can get all file and the file extensions to upper case. But the extension should remain in lowercase, so my approach does not work. Any programming language is welcome.

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• Windows 7 Software Installation : Siemens Step7 and Siemens SCL

  - by Shaharyar

  Hello sysadmins, We use Siemens Step7 and SCL for PLC programming in our company. I recently got to install Windows 7 and had yet to find out that the Siemens software suite doesn't install anymore. - Which is a pain... Checking through the setup files, I found following entries in the Setups.ini file: [OS] PlattformIDAllowed=1;2 WinXP=True WinXPExclude=0,Home,1 WinXPWarning=1 WinNETServer=True WinNETServerExclude=Home,0,1 WinNETServerWarning=Home,0,1 Win2003=1 Win2003Exclude=Home,0,1 Win2003Warning=Home,0,1 Win2003R2=1 Win2003R2Exclude=0,1 Win2003R2Warning=0,1 WinVista=1 Win2008=1 Win7=1 I added the last line to try things out and it still provides me the same error.. As far as I know the suite is installed by Install**Shield**. All help would be very appreciated!

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• Using a secondary DNS when lookup fails in primary? [migrated]

  - by Huckle

  I use a VPN to connect my development machine to my school's CS dept. The development machine is Ubuntu as we do C programming in Unix. I used vpnc to do that. The school uses some DNS entries that only resolve on their DNS servers, i.e., internalserver.csdept.school.edu I am normally attached to the VPN whenever booted for convenience. However I noticed the other day that when I disconnect the VPN all my DNS queries fail. This obviously means that vpnc set up the school's DNS to be used. However I'd rather not use their DNS all the time (tracking and privacy and whatnot). Is there a way I can restore my ISP's DNS and then if the lookup fails, have it use my school's DNS?

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• Eclipse making background video skip with almost every click of the mouse

  - by RustyH

  The problem is i like to listen to videos online (mostly or all flash video) while programming and never had any problems until i started using eclipse, now every time i do just about anything other than type, it makes the video skip/freeze really bad and is really annoying. I have never had this happen using visual studio, netbeans, or adobe flash for that matter, unless i was compiling or doing something that hogs the processor. Are there any settings that might could fix this its getting really annoying. it happens almost every time i even click "find" on the find pop-up window and it is not like it is having to search a big file or anything it is only 700 lines, with honestly only about 1/2 that have content on them. Any ideas?

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• Safari corrupting downloads?

  - by Kaji

  First off, a bit of background: I had to do an erase and install about 2-3 weeks ago, so this is a fresh, up-to-date installation of Snow Leopard we're dealing with. That said, I decided recently to branch out from simply programming PHP in a text editor and explore some of the other technologies I keep hearing about, and picked up Drupal, Joomla, and the Zend Framework from their respective official sites. Latest complete, stable builds for all 3. Drupal and Joomla downloaded without a problem, but when I put them in my /~username/Sites folder, XAMPP pretends they're not there, even if I restart Apache or the laptop itself. Zend's archive won't open at all. Is Safari corrupting the downloads, or are there other issues in play that can be investigated?

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• Vertical alignment problem in textbox in MS Word 2007

  - by Surjya Narayana Padhi

  Hi, I pardon as its not a programming question at all. But if anybody can answer this it will be usefull for me. In MS word 2007 I drew a textbox and entered some text. Then I right clicked on textbox and went to format shape Then went to TextBox tab and reduced the top internal margin to 0.1 cm. But still it seems there is too much space at the top inside the textbox. I am not able to position the text exactly at the vertical middle of textbox. If I choose the auto-rezide option in format Shape, the textBox size is increases automatically but the text remains exactly at vertical and horizontal middle of textbox. but anyhow I need the textbox to be small. This is very minor but annoying problem. Can anybody help?

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• USB to LPT adapter?

  - by Dave

  I'm bummed out, pretty much all of our computers here lack parallel ports. I have an EETools ChipMax programming tool that has one of the old-school Centronics connectors on the back. I figured that someone must make a USB to LPT adapter. Sure enough, I found one from iogear, the GUC1284B that is a USB to Parallel Printer cable. Note the boldface on the Printer. It must connect to a printer -- it isn't some generic USB to parallel interface, unfortunately. Does anyone here know of an adapter that works for parallel devices that aren't printers? I'd hate to have to buy a USB version of the ChipMax when I don't need to use it very much.

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• Vertical alignment problem in textbox in Microsoft Word 2007

  - by Surjya Narayana Padhi

  I pardon as its not a programming question at all. But if anybody can answer this it will be usefull for me. In MS word 2007 I drew a textbox and entered some text. Then I right clicked on textbox and went to format shape Then went to TextBox tab and reduced the top internal margin to 0.1 cm. But still it seems there is too much space at the top inside the textbox. I am not able to position the text exactly at the vertical middle of textbox. If I choose the auto-rezide option in format Shape, the textBox size is increases automatically but the text remains exactly at vertical and horizontal middle of textbox. but anyhow I need the textbox to be small. This is very minor but annoying problem. Can anybody help?

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• git networking for small team

  - by takeshin

  I'm trying to set up git for my programming team. My setup is: 1. example.com (Ubuntu server) IP: 192.168.1.2 (public: xxx.yyy.yyy.zzz) main git repository in /var/www/testgit user: mot (root) 2. host2, Ubuntu IP: 192.168.1.101 git clone of main repo in ~/public_html/testgit1 user: nairda 3. host3, Ubuntu IP: 192.168.1.102 git clone of main repo in ~/www/testgit2 user: mot 4. host4, Windows Vista, Samba, msysgit IP: 192.168.1.103 git clone of main repo in c:\shared\testgit3 user: ataga I start a new main repo: cd /var/www/testgit1 git init Now, a lot of questions: Which groups and users do I have to create? How to set up required ssh keys? (I'm playing with gitosis, but with no success by now.) How to make the main repo visible to other hosts? How to clone this repo on the hosts? How to pull changes from others to main repo?

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• Open source Distributed computing tool

  - by Prasenjit Chatterjee

  I want to set up distributed computing on my Local Area Network consisting a bunch of PCs. Say for the time being each one has the same OS - Windows 7. Is there any opensource tool available so that I can share the resources of these PCs over the LAN and increase the speed of my applications and the memory space. I know that if its a graphics intensive application then, it is not very practical, because the speed of LAN is much slower than Graphics processors. But I only want to share general applications, some basic softwares, Programming language IDEs etc. Can anyone shed some light on it? Thanks in Advance..

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• Word2007 - Preventing mid-item line breaks in a list in a table

  - by Dan

  It's not programming, but it's the paperwork you have to fill out ot get things to program. When you have a list with an item that's two lines long, and text above pushes it down such that a page break should fall between the two lines, Word pushes the item down so that both lines are on the following page - this is called Widow/Orphan Control and is an option on the Paragraph menu. When the list is inside of a table cell, however, this feature doesn't seem to work - which is what I'm looking to work around. Word doesn't push the item down automatically, so it breaks across two pages, as seen here: Solutions that have been tried: Playing with the options on the Paragraph tab: doesn't seem to do anything Changing the margins or text: this is a template and will need to always work Any ideas?

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• Disabling partition just for one OS on multi-boot system

  - by Emiswelt

  Hi Regarding to the solution there: http://serverfault.com/questions/36385/how-can-i-mount-a-hard-drive-as-read-only-on-windows-xp I have a system with three partitions. One runs windows 7, one runs windows XP and is for some experimental programming and testing. I don't want to mess up anything, so I am going to disable the windows 7 partition like described on the linked page above from windows XP to protect the operating system. When I do this, is the windows 7 partition only disabled for the running XP os, or is the windows 7 partition rendered unbootable? with best regards

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• hosting people asking for my account username and password to enable curl and socket function only for me

  - by Jayapal Chandran

  I have hosted my site in a shared environment. My hosting people disabled socket function all together. and they said that we can enable only for you if i given a written statement. I did but they asked for my control panel login details so they will run some kind of script to enable it. Is it right for the hosting company to ask for credentials. They have the total control so why cant they do it? Edit: Before six months many websites in their server got hacked. So they think it would be because of socket functions and had disabled it. They say they can enable it for specific users who do programming using that and that is by email request.

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• Daemon/Software that takes changes from sql database and applies them to unix config files

  - by Dude Man

  I was wondering if there was a unix daemon available that would be capable of something like this: admin adds an IP entry to a DB; daemon finds change after wait interval and manipulates ifconfig/config files I was thinking maybe there is a plugin for cfengine that might be able to do this, but I couldn't find any. I mean this would be a fairly easy thing to script up in perl, but why re-invent the wheel if theres already something out there that is better than what my limited programming abilities can make. Lastly, if it worked on FreeBSD that'd be great.

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• Using Zebra LP 2844-Z over the network

  - by Jason Kealey

  Hello, I am looking for a network-based label printer. I am looking at this Zebra LP-2844-Z printer. Unfortunately, it does not come with a network interface like the lower-end LP 2824 Plus. The ZebraNet 10/100 Print Server is both expensive for what it does (~$600) and only seems to support wireless networking, not wired. I prefer wired for reliability. Questions: Can I use a cheaper off-the-shelf print server to turn the LP-2844Z to a network printer. Would I get any trouble communicating with the printer via its own programming language or via OPOS? (instead of the Windows driver) Are cheaper print servers reliable? Would I be better to get another printer model that has it built in directly to avoid having issues due to the print server? What other printer would you recommend?

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• Which Single Source Publishing tools and strategies are available?

  - by Another Registered User

  I'm about to write a 1000-Pages Documentation about a huge programming framework. The goal is to bring this documentation online into an web platform, so that online users can search through it and read it online. At the same time, the text has to be made public in PDF format for download. And at the same time, the whole thing needs to go into a printed book as well (print on demand, they want a giant PDF file with the whole book). The PDF files: The whole content is divided into several chapters. Every chapter will be available as a standalone PDF eBook. And finally, all chapters will be available in one huge printed book. Is LaTeX capable for something like that? Can it be used for Single Source Publishing? Or would I have to take a look at other technologies like DocBook, etc.?

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• Keyboard, Dual Monitor Question

  - by Dmn

  Im about to get a 23inch Monitor to connect to my laptop for programming, and general multimedia besides. (this is the monitor what do you think? LG 23" LCD And would you recommend getting a keyboard to use (ie not using the laptop one?) seems like it would be kinda awkward otherwise. This is the keyboard im looking at because it seems to have the low laptop style keys. ||| tigerdirect .com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5214790&sku=L23-0054 ||| or would you recommend something different? Thanks

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