Well with Java 5 and higher, you won’t have to create your own conversion routine any longer.

Say for example you wanted to specify a value in seconds but the method you need to call expects a value in milliseconds (which is a common thing in Java).

Then this would be how you can convert the value with the java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit utility.

long oneMinute = TimeUnit.SECONDS.toMillis(60);

Java 5′s TimeUnit supports conversion to and from nano, micro, milli and seconds while Java 6′s TimeUnit also supports minutes, hours and days.

Today, I’ll be discussing the behavior of “switch” statements in both Java and C#.

Consider this snippet for Java which prints out the values “1″, “2″ and “Default” when value = 1.

Since I did not add “break” statements after each case, it should execute the code in the next cases up to the point where it reaches a break statement (or exits the switch).

switch (value) {
   case 1:
      System.out.println("1");
   case 2:
      System.out.println("2");
   default:
      System.out.println("Default");
      break;
}

You would think that the snippet for C# below (which is patterned after the code above) would behave in exactly the same way.

switch (value)
{
   case 1: System.Console.WriteLine("1");
   case 2: System.Console.WriteLine("2");
   default: System.Console.WriteLine("Default");
      break;
}

But this is where it gets interesting, the code above will actually NOT compile.

Error 1 Control cannot fall through from one case label (‘case 1:’) to another
Error 2 Control cannot fall through from one case label (‘case 2:’) to another

They said that this is actually a safety mechanism for C# which help prevent debugging nightmares for developers in the event that these switch statements get bigger and more complex.

Seems like a valid point.

But it might be important to note that C# still allow fall through for switch statements, provided you do not add any logic to the case statements.

switch (value)
{
   case 1:
   case 2:
   default: System.Console.WriteLine("Default");
      break;
}

You can however work around the said fall through problem by using goto which I do not really recommend (so I’m not going to add any more details about that).

As a side note, in addition to int and enum types, C# switch statements also allow string types as argument.

So there you have it folks, switch statements in Java and C#.

Hope you enjoyed and learned something from my first installment.

References:

• Accelerated C# 2008
• Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform

CTRL+SPACE for Eclipse was not working!

I tried playing with the configuration, resetting everything to defaults, removing the plugins one by one. Nothing seemed to work. I tried a fresh copy and even got to the point of installing Netbeans. And guess what, CTRL+SPACE did not work for Netbeans either!

Which lead me to the conclusion that there must be something else causing the problem. I tried killing all the unnecessary processes one by one and got to the bottom of the problem.

It was the Logitech Quickcam v10 application. Unfortunately, I didn’t have internet connection at home which explains why I had to figure out the problem all by myself.

I tried searching the net when I got to the office and saw some posts that v11 of the application already fixes the problem.

What a relief!