Control.Invoke and BeginInvoke using lamba and anonymous delegates

Working constantly with LINQ and .NET 3.5 these days, I sometimes forget how to do things without lamda expressions. Today, I was working on a WinForms application and I needed to update the UI from a separate thread, so I wrote the following code:

    this.BeginInvoke( ()=>
        {
            //code to update UI
        });

This gave me the following error:

Cannot convert lambda expression to type 'System.Delegate' because it is not a delegate type

I, then tried the anonymous delegate syntax:

    this.BeginInvoke( delegate ()
        {
            //code to update UI
        });

Still incorrect, as it gave me this error:

Cannot convert anonymous method to type 'System.Delegate' because it is not a delegate type

A quick google revealed that Control.Invoke and Control.BeginInvoke take a System.Delegate as parameter that is not a delegate type and we need to cast our lambas or anonymous delegates to MethodInvoker or Action like this:

    this.BeginInvoke( (Action) (()=>
        {
            this.txtLongestWord.Text = this.longestWord;
        }));

The above code does not look good due to lot of brackets, so let’s use the anonymous delegate syntax:

    this.BeginInvoke( (Action) delegate ()
        {
            //code to update UI
        });

//or

    this.BeginInvoke( (MethodInvoker) delegate ()
        {
            //code to update UI
        });

T-SQL: Using cursor with Common Table Expressions

Cursors aren’t a bad choice for certain scenarios. Few days back, I was writing a stored procedure that was to be scheduled as a SQL agent job. I needed to send emails for each row of a result set and hence concluded that a Fast Forward cursor (Read Only, Forward only cursor) would be a nice choice. I created several CTEs (common table expressions) to reach my final result set and declared a cursor for my final select statement like this:

--declare some CTEs
;With CTE1 as
(
   --CTE1 definitiion
)
,CTE2 as
(
   --CTE2 definitiion
)

--declare a cursor for final select statement
Declare myCursor Cursor Fast_Forward For
   --select query
   Select ... From CTE2

But I was greeted with the following error:

Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'Declare'.


Ok, so my expected syntax is incorrect. After a quick google, I found that the declare cursor statement needs to be on the top of CTE declarations. So, here’s the correct syntax to define cursor with CTEs:

--declare a cursor above the CTE definitions
Declare myCursor Cursor Fast_Forward For

--declare CTEs
With CTE1 as
(
   --CTE1 definitiion
)
,CTE2 as
(
   --CTE2 definitiion
)

--select query as normal
Select ... From CTE2

--now open and use the cursor and don't forget to close and deallocate it in the end

Cool!! That was a nice learning.

Winning TSQL Challenge 12

It’s a source of great pleasure for me that I am included in the winners for TSQL challenge 12.

Here’s my post describing my solution and here’s the analysis by Jacob Sebastian, the founder and president of TSQL Challenges.