New Linq2Azure Release

We released a new version of Linq2Azure this week, allowing management (creation, termination & failover) of SQL Database Geo-Replicas. Checkout the Linq2Azure release notes for more details.

YOW! West 2015

If anyone is is interested in presenting at YOW! West this year, the submission page is now online.

LightBlue: An alternative to the Azure Emulator

For certain projects, my team uses a componentized and distributed system architecture based on CQRS and Event Sourcing. We find that for complex domains that add significant business value, this sort of architecture is worth the extra investment as it helps ensure that:

• The system scales.
• The system is easier to maintain.
• If the business change their mind or introduce new requirements, it is easier to deal with.
• When things do go wrong, the system degrades instead of going offline completely.
• DR environments are relatively easy to build.

We do all this using Microsoft’s PaaS offering as we like to run each component on its own stack, and Windows Azure allows us to easily deploy, update & maintain everything. However… for our team members to build & test components in this environment, there needs to be a way for them to run the system locally. Given the architecture, this might involving running many roles and instances (processes) that are all communicating with each other via a messaging system built on top of Azure Blob Storage. Unfortunately we’ve found the Azure Storage Emulator has significant short comings in this type of environment. It doesn’t scale very well, utilizes lots of system resources and suffers from a number of stability issues. This has ultimately been chewing up lots of developer man hours in maintenance and troubleshooting.

Introducing LightBlue

LightBlue is a development framework that abstracts our dependency on the Azure platform. It provides a light-weight hosting mechanism allowing both worker & web roles to be deployed (without packaging) in a dedicated process. This approach has yielded the following advantages:

• Faster build times. We found the packaging step required to deploy to the Azure Emulator is very slow. LightBlue does not require packaging.
• Much faster blob storage access. Under low/moderate load, we’ve found the Azure Storage Emulator consistently takes ~1 second and regularly takes up to 10 seconds to be retrieve a blob of less than 1 KB.
• Slow & buggy compute emulator UI. It’s just gone.
• No limits. The Azure emulator limits the number of roles, deployments you are running.
• Reduced Hard Drive usage. The Azure Emulator seems to use a lot of disk space.
• Reduced CPU usage. We found that the Azure Storage Emulator used a lot (or all) of the CPU resources available on our developers machines.
• More Stable. The Azure Storage Emulator regularly falls over under load.

*Warning*

• We consider LightBlue to be in the “experimental quality band” (it has been in development for 9 days).
• We do not advise moving your projects over to it at this stage, however we do encourage you to try it out and let us know what you think.
• Do not expect future versions of the API and emulator to offer any level of compatibility with this early release.
• LightBlue is currently dependent on Autofac (IoC Container), I’m advocating a different approach here.
• Azure Queues / Topics are not yet supported (coming!).
• The “Getting Started” documentation is a bit sparse, we’re working on it!

I’ll keep you up to date as development progresses. Kudos to Colin Scott for all his hard work and late nights on the project.

LightBlue Resources

• Wiki
• Source Code
• NuGet
• Getting Started with Worker Roles

Solving Puzzles in C#: Poker Hands

I particularly like the solution to this puzzle as it can be easily adapted to any problem involving a deck of cards & the probability of being dealt a particular hand.

In this post I’ll be linking each code snippet to “LINQPad instant share” so you can literally execute the code as we go!

The Question

(courtesy of Mitch Wheat)

“How many five-card hands from a standard (52 card) deck of cards contain at least one card in each suit?”

LINQPad Solution

So as you might have guessed, we’re going to use a brute force approach. Before we can tackle the specific problem, we need to come up with a way of generating all possible hands. I figured the simplest (and reasonably efficient) way to represent a deck of cards is with a sequence of integers, each representing a card in the deck.

Enumerable.Range(0,52)

What’s nice about this, is we can quickly assign each integer a suit & the respective card values using the following query.

Generating Cards (http://share.linqpad.net/rkqnan.linq)

from i in Enumerable.Range(0,52)
let suit = i / 13
let card = (i % 13)
select new { card, suit }

This step is not necessary, but you might want to assign each card & suit an enum value. I didn’t actually do this, but if you don’t understand what’s going on here, it might help!

Generating Gold Plated Cards (http://share.linqpad.net/5usvcx.linq)

enum Suit { Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades }

enum Card { Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Jack, Queen, King, Ace }

void Main()
{
    var query = 
        from i in Enumerable.Range(0,52)
        let suit = (Suit)(i / 13)
        let card = (Card)(i % 13)    
        select new { card, suit };
    
    query.Dump();
}

OK, now that we have a deck of cards, let’s see how we can generate all possible 5 card hands. This is probably the crux of the puzzle & it is a little bit tricky: ordering is not important with a hand of cards & in addition to this, we’re “sampling with out replacement”; a card can only appear in a hand once.

First step is to decide on a method name, I’m going with GetAllHands.

Next we should nail down the interface (I’ve opted for a recursive solution). Remember our deck of cards will be represented as a sequence of integers, so our method will need to accept an IEnumerable<int>. Likewise, each hand can also be represented in this manner (as a sequence of integers) except this method will generate all possible (many) hands, so we can return an IEnumerable<IEnumerable<int>>.

Method Signature

IEnumerable<IEnumerable<int>> GetAllHands(IEnumerable<int> deck)

The only thing I’d like to add here, is a parameter that tells our function the size of the hand. This is important as my recursive approach will need this and we might want to generate all possible 2 card hands later (Texas hold’em).

IEnumerable<IEnumerable<int>> GetAllHands(IEnumerable<int> deck, int handSize)

With these types of problems, I generally find it easiest to work on the non-recursive (first level of depth) solution first. Imagine we just need to return all possible 1 card hands.

Generate All One Card Hands (http://share.linqpad.net/ebh299.linq)

void Main()
{
    var deck = Enumerable.Range(0,52);
    GetAllHands(deck,1).Dump();
}

IEnumerable<IEnumerable<int>> GetAllHands(IEnumerable<int> deck, int handSize)
{
    foreach(var card in deck)
    {
        if(handSize == 1) yield return new[]{card};
    }
}

Easy right? OK, it’s now time to add a sprinkling of recursion! For two card hands, we just need to call our function again, and concatenate the hands together.

Adding Recursion (http://share.linqpad.net/fii9wv.linq)

IEnumerable<IEnumerable<int>> GetAllHands(IEnumerable<int> deck, int handSize)
{
    foreach(var card in deck)
    {
        if(handSize == 1) yield return new[]{card};
        else foreach(var hand in GetAllHands(deck, handSize-1))
            yield return new[]{card}.Concat(hand);
    }
}

Looking at our output, there are two problems.

1. We are producing the same hand in different orders: {1,0} & {0,1}
2. We are sampling with replacement, we can’t have the same card in the hand twice: {0, 0}

To solve this problem, we just need to remove a card from the deck once we’ve generated all the hands it’s involved in.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone (http://share.linqpad.net/futqdc.linq)

IEnumerable<IEnumerable<int>> GetAllHands(IEnumerable<int> deck, int handSize)
{
    var count = 0;
    foreach(var card in deck)
    {
        if(handSize == 1) yield return new[]{card};
        else foreach(var hand in GetAllHands(deck.Skip(++count), handSize-1))
            yield return new[]{card}.Concat(hand);
    }
}

OK, so now this is where this solution really comes into its own. Not only can we compute how many 5 card hands there are, we have a sequence of all 2598960 hands meaning we can query it with LINQ!

If we think back to the puzzle that started all this, we’re interested in finding all the hands that contain at least one card from each suit. We can filter out any hand that doesn’t meet this criteria with a simple where clause!

The Solution (http://share.linqpad.net/u9q7aq.linq)

from hand in GetAllHands(deck, 5)
let suits = hand.Select(x => (Suit)(x / 13))
where suits.Contains(Suit.Hearts)
where suits.Contains(Suit.Clubs)
where suits.Contains(Suit.Diamonds)
where suits.Contains(Suit.Spades)
select hand

What’s interesting is how easy it is to adapt this to other poker hands. Here are some examples:

All Flushes (http://share.linqpad.net/349fer.linq)

from hand in GetAllHands(deck, 5)
let suits = hand.Select(x => (Suit)(x / 13))
where suits.All(x => x == Suit.Hearts)
    || suits.All(x => x == Suit.Clubs)
    || suits.All(x => x == Suit.Diamonds)
    || suits.All(x => x == Suit.Spades)
select hand

PS. When verifying this answer I found some poker websites incorrectly compute this one! They should have used LINQPad.

Three Fours (http://share.linqpad.net/n63fsf.linq)

from hand in GetAllHands(deck, 5)
let cards = hand.Select(x => (Card)(x % 13))
where cards.Count(x => x == Card.Four) == 3
select hand

Pretty cool huh?! I think that just about wraps it up: Another puzzle solved in C#!

Stay tuned for an interesting alternative solution.

Record Types & Pattern-Matching Coming in C# 6?

A developer from the Roslyn (.NET Compiler Platform) team recently published a *draft* specification for Records & Pattern-Matching in C#. It seems that the proposed language specification is an attempt to neatly integrate these two concepts (borrowed from F#, Haskell and friends) into the C# language. For some background see:

Pattern Matching in F#
Records in F#
Pattern Matching in Haskell

Record Types

Similar to records in F#, the proposed record type (referred to as a record class) is a new type of class that makes it easier to define & maintain read-only (immutable by default) POCOs, with the compiler handling generation of:

1. Private Backing Fields
2. Properties (field accessors)
3. Equals (override equality operator)
4. Is (required by the new pattern-matching operator)
5. GetHashCode
6. ToString

As an example, a record type defined as follows:

public record class Student(int age: Age, string name: Name);

Would instruct the compiler to generate the following:

public class Student 
{ 
    private readonly int _age;
    private readonly string _name; 
    
    public Student(int age, string name) 
    {
        _age = age;
        _name = name;
    }
    
    public int Age { get { return _age; } }
    public string Name { get { return _name; } } 

    // new "is" operator required for "pattern-matching"
    public static bool operator is( Student student, out int age, out string name) 
    {
        age = student.Age;
        name = student.Name;
        return true; 
    } 

    public override bool Equals(object obj)
    {    
        var o = obj as Student;
        return !ReferenceEquals(o, null)
            && object.Equals(_age, o.Age) 
            && object.Equals(_name, o.Name); 
    } 

    public override int GetHashCode() 
    {    
        int v = 1203787; 
        v = (v * 28341) + Age?.GetHashCode().GetValueOrDefault(); 
        v = (v * 28341) + Name?.GetHashCode().GetValueOrDefault();
        return v;
    } 

    public override string ToString() 
    {
        return new System.Text.StringBuilder()
            .Append("Student(Age: ")
            .Append(_age)
            .Append(", Name: ")
            .Append(_name)
            .Append(")")
            .ToString(); 
    } 
} 

While all of this code generation and syntactic sugar will no doubt make our lives easier, the really interesting thing here is the new “is” operator. From what I’ve learnt, the proposal states that any type implementing this operator (not just record types) will be compatible with pattern-matching expressions and overriding this with user-defined code will allow the programmer to extend the pattern-matching capabilities.

Patterns

This part of the proposed feature will allow developers to control program flow, using familiar if-is or switch statements, by expressing the “shape” data must be matched to including:

• Types
• Constants
• Variables
• Wildcards
• Recursive Patterns

As an example, consider how we’d currently control program flow based on the type of a variable.

var button = control as Button;
if(button != null) button.Click();

Using a “Type Pattern” we’d be able to simplify this:

if(control is Button button) button.Click();

While this is a fairly trivial example, complex pattern matching, including switch statements & recursive patterns may revolutionize the way we write some C# programs. I understand the team is planning to publish a prototype “in a few weeks”, so I’ll post some real world examples of how the different types of patterns might be used.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more, the draft specification is available here.

Solving Puzzles with C#: Coins in a Bag

This is the first post in my new blog series focusing on solving puzzles in C# & LINQPad!

In the team I work with, it has become common practice for people to taunt their fellow developers by proposing interesting and sometimes mind bending puzzles. Aside from being a bit of fun, this often results in some interesting snippets of code and I thought it would be a shame not to share this with the wider community.

Coins in a Bag

(courtesy of Mitch Wheat)

“Two indistinguishable coins are placed in a black bag. One coin is biased towards heads – it comes up heads with probability 0.6

The other coin is biased towards tails – it comes up heads with probability 0.4. For both coins, the outcomes of successive flips are independent.

You select a coin at random from the bag and flip it 5 times. It comes up heads 3 times – what is the probability that it was the coin that is biased towards tails?”

LINQPad Solution

Although it is likely that the author of the puzzle intended us to use real maths, this problem is remarkably easy to simulate with a program.

Firstly, we need to write two functions that simulates flipping the coins (you can do this with one function, however this is easier to follow).

static Random r = new Random();

// Flip the heads weighted coin
public static string Heads()
{
    return r.Next(1000) >= 400 ? "Heads" : "Tails";
}

// Flip the tails weighted coin
public static string Tails()
{
    return r.Next(1000) >= 400 ?  "Tails" : "Heads";
}

OK, now that we’ve modelled the two different coins, we can write a LINQ query that simulates the exact scenario outlined in the puzzle definition.

    var query = 
        // run the test 1 million times
        from e in Enumerable.Range(1,1000000) 
        // take a coin from the bag
        let isHeads = r.Next() % 2 == 0
        // flip the coin 5 times
        let results = isHeads 
            // calling our weighted to heads function
            ? Enumerable.Range(0,5).Select(_ => Heads()).ToArray()
            // or call our weighted to tails function
            : Enumerable.Range(0,5).Select(_ => Tails()).ToArray()
        // we're only results where we managed to get 3x heads in a row
        where results.Count(x => x == "Heads") == 3
        select isHeads;

If you’d like to play with this, I’ve uploaded the solution to "LINQPad Instant Share".

Enjoy!

Linq2Azure 1.1.0.0 released!

FYI

http://linq2azure.com/2014/07/28/linq2azure-1-1-0-0-update-released/

Linq2Azure 1.0.0.7 released!

FYI

http://linq2azure.com/2013/07/18/linq2azure-1-0-0-7-update/

Linq2Azure – NuGet Package Released!

We’ve just released the Linq2Azure API to the NuGet Gallery, this is targeted at people who are trying to build automation into their applications or deployment scripts.

If you just want to try out Linq2Azure, I’d recommend the Linq2Azure LINQPad driver instead.

NOTE: At this stage .NET 4.5 is required!

We will consider releasing a .NET 4.0 version of the API if the community requires.

Linq2Azure 1.0.0.1 – LINQPad driver update!

This update contains a bug fix for configuration serialization. The bug would cause cloud deployments & configuration updates to fail as the XML was invalid.

Just working out the LINQPad driver deployment process more than anything else.

More soon!