Justins Fat Tire

Many times in coding you are dealing with transforming data from one type to another.  I often find myself creating integers, longs, etc from strings.  Especially in .net for some reason.  I got tired of writing tons of code to handle this.  .Net gives you a great way to convert an array from one type to another. Currently I would always end up writing a for loop iterating through the array and doing a manual copy.  It would look something like this: string[] someStringValues; int[] someIntValues = new int[someStringValues.Length]; for( int i = 0; i < someStringValues.Length; i++ ) {    someIntValues[i] = int.Parse( someIntValues[i] ); } Not horrible code, but there is a more succinct way of doing it! string[] someStringValues; int[] someIntValues = Array.ConvertAll<string, int>( someStringValues, int.Parse ); We have now moved all that code into 1 line.  With some more magic we can also move this into a generic templated solu...

Today I'm getting a bit into data structures. Recently I've found a need to store a large amount of records (16 million) in memory as a sort of cache. I tried using databases, etc, but it was all too slow. I needed super fast access times, well under a millisecond to speed up a large application with many data look ups. I tried a linked list but while the insert times were great the look ups again were too slow. I finally settled on a binary tree. Building the tree is slow, several minutes, but this data doesn't change and gives me super fast look up times, around .005 ms. To achieve this I wrote a very simple binary tree class. It uses a node that is fit for my purposes. To make this class even better I would implement in generics with a node class that has to implement IComparable. This way you can make a binary tree for any type of class that can be compared. For now I'm hard coding the key/values for my specific needs. See the rather large code block bel...