Category: .NET

.NET: wddx.net library revision

Before web services, before JSON, before many other things or people ever thought about it,  there was this other way to exchange data across platforms via the Internet using XML. It was called WDDX (Web Distributed Data Exchange).

According to Wikipedia this its definition:

WDDX (Web Distributed Data eXchange) is a programming-language-, platform- and transport-neutral data interchange mechanism to pass data between different environments and different computers. It supports simple data types such as number, string, boolean, etc., and complex aggregates of these in forms such as structures, arrays and recordsets (row/column data, typically coming from database queries).

Support for WDDX is available natively in several languages including ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, and Python. Other languages implement this through add ons. .NET belongs to the later category, thus needs a library to process WDDX. Unfortunately, this library has not seen updates in a long while. It is open source and was created by Joel Mueller early in the 2000s and not much happened since then.

First, Kudos for Joel taking on this project and making it available. It is well documented and executed; unfortunately, as with any software, there were some issues. Having discovered these and “fixed” them, the question of getting the fixes back into distribution came up. After several attempts to contact the current maintainer of this project and several months of wait time I got very frustrated and decided to take over some of this.

Rather than branching this on Microsoft Codeplex site (this is Microsoft’s site for maintaining open source projects) I used Git Hub. The main reason for me to use another site for maintenance was that Codeplex seem to not get any attention from Microsoft. Bug messages were being ignored, documentation did not match to what the site did or operated.

Download WDDX.NET library: https://github.com/Bilal-S/WDDX.net

So I hope that if you need WDDX support in .NET you will check out this project.
As usual please let me know if you find any issues.

Best,
B.

.NET: C# find pattern in byte array

Byte Arrays are not as easily handled as strings when it comes to finding what they contain, especially if we are searching for a pattern of matching bytes.
It seems like everyone is rolling their own on this one. Most examples I have seen look at converting bytes to strings and then using IndexOf operators.
However, if you use bytes that cannot be converted to a string easily or do not want to use string comparison here is my version of a working function that does the trick.


private static int ByteSearch(byte[] searchIn, byte[] searchBytes, int start = 0)
{
    int found = -1;
    bool matched = false;
    //only look at this if we have a populated search array and search bytes with a sensible start
    if (searchIn.Length > 0 && searchBytes.Length > 0 && start <= (searchIn.Length - searchBytes.Length) && searchIn.Length >= searchBytes.Length)
    {
        //iterate through the array to be searched
        for (int i = start; i <= searchIn.Length - searchBytes.Length; i++)
        {
            //if the start bytes match we will start comparing all other bytes
            if (searchIn[i] == searchBytes[0])
            {
                if (searchIn.Length > 1)
                {
                    //multiple bytes to be searched we have to compare byte by byte
                    matched = true;
                    for (int y = 1; y <= searchBytes.Length - 1; y++)
                    {
                        if (searchIn[i + y] != searchBytes[y])
                        {
                            matched = false;
                            break;
                        }
                    }
                    //everything matched up
                    if (matched)
                    {
                        found = i;
                        break;
                    }
 
                }
                else
                {
                    //search byte is only one bit nothing else to do
                    found = i;
                    break; //stop the loop
                }
 
            }
        }
 
    }
    return found;
}

Cheers,
B.