There is a phrase that comes up time and again in the world of software development:
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Basically, if you know that if you have access to reasonable code that performs the tasks you need in a timely fashion, why try to write it again for yourself. And in many ways, there is sound logic behind it. Writing the code yourself, you devote time that can otherwise be spent on other aspects of your project, you have to make all the discoveries and mistakes for yourself and there is always the chance that your code will either be slower, less elegant and possibly fail all together in the end. But perhaps a wheel is too simplistic for this kind of analogy.
Introduction
In our last Bits and Pieces post, we discussed the basic bitwise operators AND, OR, and XOR as they are used in the .NET Framework. Today there are two more functions we should discuss, to give ourselves a solid background in bitwise operations. Bitshift and Bit Checking.
An Emerging Field
Lets discuss for a few minutes the emerging field of RFID. There seems to be a general impression that application development for RFID requires extensive training and understanding before one is able to dive in. However, beneath all the complex RF and electrical engineering theory that goes into making an RFID tag work, there is the basic data stored within them. This is what developers really need to be able to manipulate and understand. While it never hurts to understand the physical linking between tags and readers, it is not entirely necessary. Most readers on the market handle all of the transmission details for you and simply accept and hand back to the software the raw data to be manipulated. So just how do we work with a tag, from a development standpoint?
Introduction
Lets dust off our CS101 textbooks for a moment and recall the subject of bitwise operations. The concepts are pretty straight forward; take an integer, shift the bits 3 spaces over, AND in a a few new bits and you have your new value. Pretty useful when memory is at a premium. In some of the primitive languages, especially Assembly, you probably would use bitwise operations quite often; really, they are one of the few operations you have. But in today’s modern languages, the concept has fell off the map a little. And with just reason. How often do we really find the need for them anymore? Memory space is of little concern in most applications these days. The need for this neglected operation still exists in some specialized development situations.
Enough introduction? Okay, lets get to the examples.
So what can you expect to find here? Like so many others out there, I have found there are plenty of excellent tools within the Microsoft .NET Framework. But at the same time, there is plenty that is missing. Then it is up to us, the developers of the world to fill in the holes. So that is my goal here, to share those plugs that I have found and developed.
In my day to day development, I find myself using VB.NET and C# to develop for desktop, ASP web applications and the WindowsMobile Compact Framework. While VB is my primary language, I will attept to keep balance and present examples in C# as well.
Surely there will be places where my code could be more complete and conditions where it is lacking, but I hope they will be of value to you and assist in your own development.
So sit back, relax and thank you for visiting.
