Python

JSON (De)Serialization of nested objects

During my first encounter of handling JSON (de)serialization in Python, I faced the problem of (de)serializing objects that have properties that are instances of another class. Using the json module, one has to write two methods, a complex_handler and a class_mapper that are fed to json.dumps and json.loads respectively. The design problem here is that the class_mapper needs to compare a dict that is to be deserialized with the properties of potential classes in order to find the matching type. In the first level of deserialization one could potentially provide the type as a parameter to the deserialization-function, but as soon as there is a child property, the type may be unknown. Therefore each class that is to be deserialized has to be registered into a collection of (properties) -> class mappings. To simplify the handling, I wrote the following JsonConvert class: Now we can define some classes and make…

C#

Migrating TCD to Windows 8 Release Preview

Two days ago, I migrated my laptop to Windows 8 Release Preview and today Windows Live Mesh finished syncing all of my files. So in the last few hours I migrated all the dev stuff and I’d like to share the latest versions of them too. Most of the libraries haven’t changed that much, only their namespaces have changed from TCD.Windows8.xxxx to TCD.xxxx. TCD.Serialization TCD.Serialization.Xml.XmlDeSerializer – (de)serialize an object from/to a string or Stream using XML TCD.Serialization.Json.JsonDeSerializer – (de)serialize an object from/to a string or Stream using JSON Download TCD.Serialization.zip TCD.Controls TCD.Controls.Flyout – create your own Flyout TCD.Controls.Settings.SettingsContractWrapper – integrate with the settings contract in just a few lines of code Download FlyoutAndSettingsSample.zip

C#

XML and JSON (De)Serialization in WinRT and Windows Phone

In some of my recent Metro/WinRT projects I had to save data to the disk. I decided to go for Xml-serialzation, because it’s human-readable, and flexible. Also it was perfect for the data I wanted to save (eg. metadata about a movie). (If you want to do it on your own: System.IO and System.Xml.Serialization are the namespaces you need for XML (de)serialization.) As I needed this in many projects, I composed a small library, containing a TCD.Serialization.XmlDeSerializer as well as a TCD.Serialization.JsonDeSerializer. Both have four static methods to serialize to/from Stream and string. You can download a package with the sources and a ready-to-use dll. TCD.Serialzation is available on NuGet it works with Windows Phone as well. NOTE: the methods aren’t fail-safe, so you might need to try{}catch{} them to handle exceptions. (For example if you want to serialize to a FileStream without write permission.) Have fun and let me hear…