Categories
Development

Old Code Never Dies

CheezyPing still worksI happened across some old C++ code I wrote back in 2001. I decided to put it up on GitHub for kicks, might as well put some history up for future generations, right?

I was curious to see if I could build it. The original project was built with Visual Studio 6.0, circa 1998. I have a copy of Visual Studio 2010, so I fired it up pointed it at the original cp.dsw file and was pleasantly surprised it converted. I selected Build All and got a few warnings about some ATL include files I no longer needed, so I removed those. The only other thing that needs correcting are a few warnings related to use of older CRT string copy functions that are not secure. If you’ve upgraded a C or C++ project over the last few years you’ll be familiar with this warning:

warning C4996: '_tcsncpy': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using _tcsncpy_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details.

The code still builds and will execute, but if I were going to use it daily, I’d update it. For now, it’s OK, the code built. Maybe I’ll download a new copy of Visual Studio 2013, get it working with that, and check it in. It would be pretty nifty to create a Mac version by doing an implementation of the HttpIf interface using NSURL and NSURLConnection. This could be a GrilledCheese implementation. Hmmmmmm.

Anywho, once I got a build I hopped out to the command line, and ran it. I was surprised to see, it still works. Amazing.

Categories
Development Indie iOS Objective-C

Better JSON to Object Serialization

Duct Tape, fixer of all things!Krzysztof ZabÅ‚ocki: “I don’t like passing around JSON so I write parsing on top of native objects like NSDictionary/NSArray. If you get data as JSON just write a simple category that transforms JSON to native objects using NSJSONSerialization.”

Here’s a nice hunk of code that will save you some time when you write your next iOS App that talks to a web service. I don’t like passing around NSArray or NSDictionary either, or even worse the raw JSON you get back from a service. I’ve written a few times about transforming JSON into an Object, and it’s not hard to do, but it’s so “boilerplate” it feels like a waste of time. Time you could use elsewhere. Krzysztof provides a nice way to get past all that boilerplate code and get automagic serialization of JSON to Object. It’s definitely worth a look and worth understanding the pattern.