Yearly Archives: 2009

2 posts

Playing with FindFirstFile and FindNextFile

1 comment
.NET C#

Enumerating files in .NET is easy. Everybody knows the GetFiles method and you may be tempted to write code like this :

var files = Directory.GetFiles(@"c:\windows\system32", "*.dll");
    foreach (var file in files)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(file);
    }

But if you look closer you will notice that this method returns an array of strings. This could be problematic if the directory you search contains lots of files. The method will block until it performs the search and once it finishes it will load all the results into memory. It would be much better if it just returned an IEnumerable. That’s exactly what the EnumerateFiles method does in .NET 4.0. Unfortunately in .NET 3.5 there’s nothing for the job.

In this post I will show how to implement this functionality using the FindFirstFile and FindNextFile functions. Continue reading →

Fun with matrix multiplication and unsafe code

2 comments
.NET C#

In this post I will compare two methods that perform matrix multiplication. We start by defining the Matrix class:

class Matrix
    {
        private readonly double[,] _matrix;
        public Matrix(int dim1, int dim2)
        {
            _matrix = new double[dim1, dim2];
        }

        public int Height { get { return _matrix.GetLength(0); } }
        public int Width { get { return _matrix.GetLength(1); } }

        public double this[int x, int y]
        {
            get { return _matrix[x, y]; }
            set { _matrix[x, y] = value; }
        }
    }

Next we add the first algorithm to the Matrix class which performs a naive multiplication:

 public static Matrix NaiveMultiplication(Matrix m1, Matrix m2)
    {
        Matrix resultMatrix = new Matrix(m1.Height, m2.Width);
        for (int i = 0; i < resultMatrix.Height; i++)
        {
            for (int j = 0; j < resultMatrix.Width; j++)
            {
                resultMatrix[i, j] = 0;
                for (int k = 0; k < m1.Width; k++)
                {
                    resultMatrix[i, j] += m1[i, k] * m2[k, j];
                }
            }
        }
        return resultMatrix;
    }

The second method uses unsafe code: Continue reading →