Category: Random Coding

I’ve heard a few times in passing that you can count cards and beat the casino in Black Jack. Over the years I spent a little time understanding the basic premise, but only got a shallow idea and never knew if it actually worked. I don’t often go to the casino and I have a crazy low risk tolerance when I do go. Usually I pull out $200 bucks for gambling and then come home empty handed. So do I actually know how it works? Each time I go, I always think I should really test this out and find out.

So I wrote an implementation of the BlackJack game. The rules of BlackJack card counting that I found here and also a simulator. Most YouTube or web content shows the basic ideas of how to count and bet. However, it misses some important details that I was able to uncover with my simulator.

I’m prepping a video for it … Read the rest

Wanting to be a little more thrifty on a side project, I decided to roll with MySQL and EntityFramework. There were a few gotchas, outside of the normal tutorial and I’m just putting this out here to save time for anyone else who may have had to deal with the issues I ran across.

Data Model defined in a separate library

Most of the 101 examples have the data model included in the MVC, WebAPI or Console/UI project that is typically the startup project. However, if you have your data model defined in a separate project don’t forget to add the “-StartupProjectName” argument when invoking any of the migration commands.

ex:

enable-migrations -StartupProjectName [DataModelLibName] -ProjectName [DataModelLibName]
add-migration -StartupProjectName [DataModelLibName] -ProjectName [DataModelLibName]
update-database -StartupProjectName [DataModelLibName] -ProjectName [DataModelLibName]

This argument is actually telling the migration command where to look for the configuration of the providers and the target database to migrate. If you have everything configured in the shell startup project, then … Read the rest

Originally, I posted a question on StackOverflow

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21630431/entityframework-detecting-complex-type-with-database-first

While we’re still not using complex types, we’ve worked out a mechanism to preventing our developers from breaking the autogenerated models when re-generating from the DB.

We’ve altered the T4 template generated by EF.

First we’ve created a method in the CodeStringGenerator class

public string BaseClassAndInterfaces(EntityType entity)
{
    var properties = new List(_typeMapper.GetSimpleProperties(entity));
    bool hasAuditFields = false;
    if (properties.Exists(property =_code.Escape(property) == "CreatedBy") &&
        properties.Exists(property =_code.Escape(property) == "CreatedDate") &&
        properties.Exists(property =_code.Escape(property) == "UpdatedBy") &&
        properties.Exists(property =_code.Escape(property) == "UpdatedDate"))
    {
        hasAuditFields = true;
    }

    return string.Format(" : {0}", hasAuditFields ? "Auditable" : "NotificationObject");
}

If it detects that a table contains those auditing fields, then it prepares to generate the class with a base class “Auditable”, which has those four properties. You’ll notice that if we don’t see the auditing properties, we then set the base class to NotificaitonObject. That’s because we’re still using our own variant of the … Read the rest

So it’s been a little while as I’ve been busy assisting my beautiful wife on some projects she’s had, I’ve been at the tail end of a working marathon and finally I was on vacation last week. However, I’ve got a bit of free time now and I wanted to share an interesting downside of distributed version control systems.

Sometimes, you’ll have team members who will carelessly deposit massive multi-megabyte files, they’ll alter it to store more multi-megabyte files. These files then duplicate everywhere and make merging insanely painful from the sheer size.

There are solutions to this problem, but it’s a multi-step process that involves a priest, a rabbi, a shaman, 6 shots of vodka and a jump rope.

With that said, this isn’t entirely the same problem in a remote version controlled repository like Subversion. If some unrelated branch has all of the megafiles, you’re not sitting there staring at the progress indicator, scrolling in a pattern that … Read the rest

While using the Newtonsoft Json.Net library I received the error

"Explicitly define an Id for the type using a JsonObject/JsonArray attribute or automatically generate a type Id using the UndefinedSchemaIdHandling property."

When attempting to generate a schema for some types that were created that have circular references. My types were created in EntityFramework database first strategy, so I didn’t want to figure out how to hack the T4 generator to add the Json attribute, and I didn’t quite understand what it mean by using the “UndefinedSchemaIdHandling property”. I suppose it might seem obvious to the author as when I searched the interwebs for an example, this was one of the first results

http://json.codeplex.com/workitem/22569

His response was pretty much recursive error output.

if (user.hasError)
{
  print(error);
  while (user.doesNotUnderstandsError) 
  {
    print(error);
  }
}

Now, unfortunately, I was in that loop for a little bit, looking at the method overloads, thinking about maybe a partial class to add the attribute, staring at the … Read the rest