Computer Science and Software Engineering Capstone Presentations
Fall Quarter
December 18, 2020
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Boyan Hristov "Internship
with Synergistics Inc." (Synergistics) Faculty Advisor: Dr. Yusuf Pisan |
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Abstract Windows restrict the length of the path within which
you can access files. If the path is larger than 216/260 characters, the
files become inaccessible, yet the longest possible path in Windows is 32767
characters. I was assigned to create a GUI with a Windows Form App in C#
which uses Windows API through marshalling, to enumerate the files in a path.
I had to implement functions for copy, search, delete, and view. In order to solve this problem, I researched the Windows
API. I used DFS-style traversal for removal and BFS-style traversal for all
other operations. The head developer, also my mentor, brought to my attention
that the GUI would freeze whenever a longer operation was running. This was
due to the main thread being the executing thread. I solved this problem by
researching multithreading in C# and writing asynchronous code. This allows
for tasks that do not involve directly updating the GUI to be run on a
separate thread which allows the main thread to continue waiting for events
from the user. In the case in which the GUI update is happening within a
function run by a thread other than the main thread, the main thread has to be invoked to perform the GUI update or the update
of the resource which doesn't belong to the current thread. I also included a
cancellation option in case the user decides to interrupt the operation if it
is taking too long or the user changes their mind. I accomplished this
through a Cancellation Token which can be used to send a signal that would
throw an Exception that will interrupt the execution of the currently running
task. I chose to write asynchronous code because it accomplishes larger tasks
more quickly and it maintains the responsiveness of the GUI. Working on this
project, I learned about C#, Windows Forms, Windows API, multithreading,
events, marshalling, data binding, reference and value types, code
reusability, code maintenance, and generics. |
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Updated December 15, 2020