Nitriq Expiration Updated to 12.7.09

I've released a minor update to Nitriq Code Analysis for .Net, there are a few small bug fixes included in this release. The beta will also now work until 12.7.09. You can download the latest version here.

I'd love to hear from about what features you'd like to see added before the launch. Shoot me an email at von@nitriq.com.

How to Create a Linq Statement from a String

Almost two years ago ScottGu posted some really awesome code that lets you create dynamic where clauses in Linq - meaning you could use a string builder to create your where clause just like the good 'ole days when ad-hoc sql was all the rage. You're going to be better off if you can build a predicate using lambdas, but sometimes its a real pain the the rear to build a proper predicate (Func<T, bool> or Predicate<T>). Building a predicate properly typically becomes difficult when you're giving your users some mechanism to build their own filter for their data.

The problem I had with ScottGu's code is that the extension methods only worked off IQueryable<T>, and well, sometimes you would like to create a dynamic where clause for a datasource that didn't come from an IQueryProvider like LinqToSql. Sometime you want to create a dynamic where clause for a plain old IEnumerable<T>.

So, I took the time to dig through ScottGu's pretty complicated code and created a handful of methods that help you generate useful dynamic functions - including dynamic "OrderBy" and "Where" extension methods for IEnumerable<T>.

I've attached a single common file that includes both ScottGu's code, as well as my own.

Download my code here:
DynamicLinqExtensions.zip (15 KB)

Examples:

IEnumerable<Person> allPeople = GetAllPeople();
foreach(var person in allPeople.Where("Age > 10").OrderBy("Age"))
{
    //notice the above arguments are strings and not lambdas
    //this makes it a lot easier to build everything ad-hoc
    Console.WriteLine(person.Age + " - " + person.FirstName);
}

I also included a method called CreateValueExpression, that will evaluate an expression on any object and return the result.

var fullName = DynamicLinqExtensions.CreateValueExpression<Person,string>("First + \" \" + Last");
//outputs "Jon von Gillern"
Console.WriteLine(fullName(new Person { First = "Jon", Last = "von Gillern" }));

You can find the Gu's original blog post here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/01/07/dynamic-linq-part-1-using-the-linq-dynamic-query-library.aspx

As always, Kicks and Shoutouts are appreciated!

Nitriq Expiration Updated to 11.16.09

I've released a minor update to Nitriq, there is a small bug fix for an analysis error. The beta will also now work until 11.16.09. You can download the latest version here.

I'd love to hear from about what features you'd like to see added before the launch. Shoot me an email at von@nitriq.com.

CopyPasteKiller - Free Code Similarity Finder

So I just published CopyPasteKiller, a free tool that helps .Net developers working with large code bases find all the places that another developer used the time honored practice of Copy-Paste Inheritance. Or sometimes the code base is so big that it is easy duplicate functionality without actually copying and pasting. Either way, CopyPasteKiller is a fast way to hunt down similar chunks of code so that they can be refactored.

CopyPasteKiller currently only works with C# and VB.NET code and isn't the most polished tool in the world, but it'll get the job done. I hope you find it useful, if you have any questions/comments/bugs please feel free to email me directly at von@nitriq.com.

You can find the download and more details here.

New Version of Nitriq Released

The previous beta version of Nitriq expires today 10.26.09. A new version of Nitriq Code Analysis for .Net has been published to the website that will expire on 11.2.09. Download Now!

There were a handful of small enhancements, including better keyboard navigation in the query toolbox window.

I'll be releasing a freeware tool tomorrow morning called CopyPasteKiller, that will help .Net developers find large chunks of similar code. Be sure to check back tomorrow morning!

Day One Traffic and Beyond

I'd really like to run Nitriq as openly as possible and share just about all my data about traffic, sales and marketing efforts, so consider this the first post of many.

I'm pretty happy with my first day of traffic, the Nitriq website had 688 visits, 1192 page views and 34 downloads of the software. About a third of those visitors came from Hacker News (click for the specific story), and about half didn't have a referrers so I'm guessing that the link came from a twitter client click. Thanks to everyone who tweeted about the launch.

I'm pretty sure that traffic is going to be significantly lower today and for the rest of the week. The long slow march to growing traffic organically has begun. I still need to send out an email to my .Net acquaintances, so hopefully that will help traffic if I can get a blog mention here or there.

Otherwise the plan to drive traffic is to blog here about .Net topics and get referenced by dotnetkicks.com and dotnetshoutout.com. I got a lot of really good traffic on my old blog (vonsharp.net) from these sites, but I haven't blogged there a whole lot since I started working on Nitriq. But, over the past year whenever I've thought of a good blog topic, I took 5 minutes to write the idea down in a Google Doc. So I have literally hundreds of potential blog posts waiting for me in the hopper. I'm hoping this will help keep me keep regular post schedule.

Be sure to tell all your friends about Nitriq Code Analysis.

Free Beta - Nitriq Code Analysis for .Net

I've been working on a code analysis application off and on for the past year or so and I finally launched tonight!

Nitriq Code Analysis helps .Net developers gain a better understanding of their code. You can visualize your code with Treemaps and you can query your code using Linq. You don’t have to learn a custom query language nor do you have to learn a complicated API like FXCop.

It won't be a free app forever, but I will have reasonable prices after it leaves beta.

Any and all blog entries and tweet reviews are more than welcome.

Check it out!