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Extending the int type to have a For method

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It’s been months since I had anything interesting to blog about. Mostly because I was working away on some new stuff I couldn’t talk about.  Anyway, now I feel like blogging again.

I’m working on an Azure Worker Role which processes messages from an Azure Queue. In the main loop of my Worker Role, I had a piece of code like this:

 var messageCount = cloudQueue.RetrieveApproximateMessageCount();
for (var i = 0; i < messageCount; i++)
{
    ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(ProcessQueueMessage);
}

Simple enough: Retrieve the approximate message count and queue up enough work items to process the messages.

Then I thought, “I’m sick of writing stupid for loops!”

So I extended the int type with the following extension method:

 /// <summary>
/// Extends int to have a For method.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="value">The int being extended.</param>
/// <param name="action">The Action to execute.</param>
public static void For(this int value, Action action)
{
    for (var i = 0; i < value; i++)
    {
        action();
    }
}

Now, I can write that loop in a single line of code:

 cloudQueue.RetrieveApproximateMessageCount().For(() => ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(this.ProcessQueueMessage));

Which is nice!  Love it.

Then I thought, “What if I need to know the ordinal value of the for loop inside the action, though?”

So I extended the int type with another extension method:

 /// <summary>
/// Extends int to have a For method.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="value">The int being extended.</param>
/// <param name="action">The Action&lt;int&gt; to execute.</param>
public static void For(this int value, Action<int> action)
{
    for (var i = 0; i < value; i++)
    {
        action(i);
    }
}

So now, I can write:

 10.For(i => Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Writing {0}", i)));

And see the following output:

Writing 0

Writing 1

Writing 2

Writing 3

Writing 4

Writing 5

Writing 6

Writing 7

Writing 8

Writing 9

Of course, I’ll want the same extensions for long, etc.  That’ll be simple enough…

Best,

Brian

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