The May Geek Dinner was long overdue but well worth the wait. I invited a record high number of people, fifteen, but due to a variety of circumstances, a record low number of people made it to the dinner: five, including myself.

I was joined by the always entertaining regulars: Paul Stovell, Keith Zerna, and Jim Burger. We were also pleased to be joined by Nigel Spencer for the first time since I started organising the dinners last year.

Aside from the usual .NET subjects, many other topics were discussed on the night, here are some links in no particular order:

• Clay Shirky on Social Surplus: video, transcript
• Perfection Fresh's naturally grown Enchanted Apple
• NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter metric mix-up
• Self-reconfigurable robots (article preview)
• Are we approaching the Great Filter?

I am writing this summary a week since the night of the dinner and I've managed to forget some of the night's events. Perhaps the other attendees could leave some comments with links to the interesting topics I've missed.

Watch this blog for details of the August 2008 Dinner which I'll likely post after Code Camp SA.

What follows is some code I wrote last week that I couldn't find anywhere else and I thought was useful. First, is a test method demonstrating my use case, followed by the implementation of the TemporaryValue classes to fulfil the requirement.

The property get lambda expression can be an instance or static property as long as it is read-write. In this implementation there is no exception handling and no multithreading considerations.

[TestMethod]
public void Original_property_value_should_be_restored_after_temporary_value_block()
{
    const string OriginalValue = "_original_value_";
    const string NewValue = "_new_value_";
    var f = new Foo {Bar = OriginalValue};

    Assert.AreSame(OriginalValue, f.Bar);

    using (TemporaryValue.For(() => f.Bar, NewValue))
    {
        Assert.AreSame(NewValue, f.Bar);
    }

    Assert.AreSame(OriginalValue, f.Bar);
}

public static class TemporaryValue 
{ 
    public static TemporaryValue For(Expression<Func> propertyGet, TValue newValue) 
    { 
        return new TemporaryValue(propertyGet, newValue); 
    } 
} 
 
public class TemporaryValue : IDisposable 
{ 
    private PropertyInfo _propertyInfo; 
    private object _target; 
    private TValue _original; 
 
    public TemporaryValue(Expression<Func> propertyGet, TValue newValue) 
    { 
        var memberExpression = (MemberExpression)propertyGet.Body; 
        _propertyInfo = (PropertyInfo)memberExpression.Member; 
 
        var targetExpression = memberExpression.Expression; 
        if (null != targetExpression) 
        { 
            _target = Expression.Lambda<Func<object>>(targetExpression).Compile().Invoke(); 
        } 
 
        _original = propertyGet.Compile().Invoke(); 
        Set(newValue); 
    } 
 
    private void Set(TValue value) 
    { 
        _propertyInfo.SetValue(_target, value, null); 
    } 
 
    public void Dispose() 
    { 
        if (null != _propertyInfo) 
        { 
            Set(_original); 
            _propertyInfo = null; 
            _target = null; 
            _original = default(TValue); 
        } 
    } 
}

After learning to manipulate lambda expressions in this way I decided it would be a good idea to use a similar approach to remove the need for string literals in an INotifyPropertyChanged implementation. Unfortunately, while I was offline for a few days, Paul got a head start.