Tag: C#

Emacs flycheck for C#

2014-April-21

I use emacs, have done so for a long time. Also a longtime fan of C#.
I wrote csharp-mode for emacs, to sort of cross the streams on those two interests.

I recently found Flycheck – which is a turn-of-the-crank on the fantastic idea that was flymake. If you don’t know flymake, it is a tool that runs a syntax check on your file, after every change. For C#, it will compile the file. For JavaScript, it runs JSHint. For CSS, it runs CSS lint. And so on for python, PHP, Java and whatever else. Flymake is part of emacs.

Flymake is a great idea, but it has some flaws. For one thing, it runs too aggressively, even on buffers you cannot see. If you have lots of buffers open, it can kill your CPU. There are a couple other warts too. Over the years, people have learned to live with them.

Flycheck is the same idea, but with improvements.

  1. it’s more efficient.
  2. the syntax highlighting is better. You get red squigglies, just like in Visual Studio.

Red Squigglies

I love open source innovation and community-driven advances!

Supposedly, with flycheck it is also easier to add in new “checkers” for various syntaxi. I don’t know if that’s true. I just built a C# checker for flycheck, and I had previously built checkers for C# (and for numerous other languages and tools) for flymake. It wasn’t so difficult in either case.

Anyway, here’s what you need to get flycheck to work with C# in emacs:

Add this to your init.el or .emacs or whatever:

And here’s how you use it:

Note the comment near the top of the file. This tells flycheck what to use for the checker command. You can specify anything there, including csc.exe on Windows.

I am now using a Mac as my main laptop, and yes, you can do C# on Mac with Mono. And this flycheck thing works there, too, natcherully.

Giving Back?

Flycheck “encourages” contributions, but the requirements are a bit too onerous for me. This potential enhancement won’t be accepted without unit tests and a bunch of other stuff. I’m not bothering with all that. So I’m just publishing this, thinking people might find it to be useful. For now, anyone can use this; it just works.

ps: you will need to have, on your path, the directory that contains the gmcs tool and the pkg-config tool, if you use mono. On MacOS this is /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/bin . You can do this in emacs, this way:

Twitter and OAuth from C# and .NET

2012-May-15

In some of my previous posts I discussed Twitter and OAuth. The reason I sniffed the protocol enough to describe it here was that I wanted to build an application that posted Tweets.  Actually, I wanted to go one better – I wanted an app that would post tweets and images, via Twitter’s /1/statuses/update_with_media.xml API call. This was for a screen-capture tool.  I wanted to be able to capture an image on the screen and “Tweet it” automatically, without opening a web browser, without “logging in”, without ever seeing a little birdy from a Twitter logo.  In other words I wanted the screen capture application to connect programmatically with Twitter.

It shouldn’t be difficult to do, I figured, but when I started looking into it in August 2011, there were no libraries supporting Twitter’s update_with_media.xml, and there was skimpy documentation from Twitter.  This is just par for the course, I think. In this fast-paced social-media world, systems don’t wait for standards or documented protocols.  Systems get deployed, and the code is the documentation.  We’re in a hurry here! The actual implementation is the documentation.  Have at it, is the attitude, and good luck!  Don’t think I’m complaining – Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram provides one billion reasons why things should work this way.

With that as the backdrop I set about investigating. I found some existing code bases, that were, how shall I put it? a little crufty.  There’s a project on google’s code repository that held value, but I didn’t like the programming model. There are other options out there but nothing definitive. So I started with the google code and reworked it to provide a simpler, higher-level programming interface for the app.

What I wanted was a programming model something like this:

var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
var authzHeader = oauth.GenerateAuthzHeader(url, "POST");
request.Method = "POST";
request.Headers.Add("Authorization", authzHeader);
using (var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
{
  if (response.StatusCode != HttpStatusCode.OK)
    MessageBox.Show("There's been a problem trying to tweet:", "!!!");
}

In other words – using OAuth adds one API call .  Just generate the header for me!  But what I found was nothing like that.

So I wrote OAuth.cs to solve that issue.  It implements the OAuth 1.0a protocol for Twitter for .NET applications, and allows desktop .NET applications to connect with Twitter very simply.

That code is available via a TweetIt app that I wrote to demonstrate the library.  It includes logic to run a web browser and programmatically do the necessary one-time copy/paste of the approval pin.  The same OAuth code is used in that screen-capture tool.

OAuth is sort of involved, with all the requirements around sorting and encoding and signing and encoding again.  There are multiple steps to the protocol, lots of artifacts like temporary tokens, access tokens, authorization verifiers, and so on.  But a programmer’s interface to the protocol need not be so complicated.