Variable Irony

Magic Booleans

dnelson — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Hopefully somewhere in your programming career you reached a point where you could recognize the following as a Bad Idea: Foo.Bar(42) What does 42 represent? Why are we passing it into the Bar method? Why not 41 or 43 instead? Presumably 42 has some particular...(read more)

Dynamic Typing and a Tale of Two Interviews

dnelson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:08:00 GMT

A manager needed to hire a new employee, so he posted an ad on a job search website. He soon had a flood of responses. The manager carefully examined the resume of each applicant, looking for specific skills that he knew the job required. Not surprisingly,...(read more)

Why I Hate Marketing

dnelson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:07:00 GMT

When I complained on Scott Hanselman's blog (on something of a tangent I admit) that the versioning of the .NET Framework was nonsensical, he asked me how I would have done it. I think he was subtly trying to point out to me that its not as easy as it...(read more)

WPF Attached Dependency Properties and Roles

dnelson — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:28:00 GMT

Attached Dependency Properties in WPF are a replacement for extender providers in WinForms, but they may also have other interesting applications....(read more)

LINQ and Duck Typing

dnelson — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:17:00 GMT

C# 3.0 saw the increasing use of duck typing, most prominently in LINQ....(read more)

Programming and Chess

dnelson — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:01:00 GMT

I got into programming and chess for the same reason: the excitement. But sometimes doing things "the right way" takes all of the fun out of it....(read more)

C# vs VB.NET

dnelson — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:53:00 GMT

If you are bilingual, or if you spend any time at all in the .NET blogosphere, you have undoubtedly witnessed many of the posts/discussions/arguments/wars over which language is better, C# or VB.NET. These skirmishes range from mild to violent, and are...(read more)

C# Language Design Decisions Explained

dnelson — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:22:00 GMT

"Ask A Language Designer" on MSDN explains design decisions made by the C# language team....(read more)

Hungarian Notation - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

dnelson — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 10:06:00 GMT

An article about Hungarian notation and a summary of my opinions on the issue....(read more)

DataSet/DataTable serialization bug with modified row and newline string value

dnelson — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 23:05:00 GMT

Recently I ran across an unusual bug in the .NET framework. Our application uses .NET remoting with DataSets, using RemotingFormat = SerializationFormat.Xml (the default in .NET 2.0, and the only option in .NET 1.1). We were getting a DBConcurrencyException...(read more)

"Project location is not trusted", on a local drive

dnelson — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 12:26:00 GMT

Dealing with the "project location is not trusted" warning in Visual Studio, when the project in question is on a local drive....(read more)

catch(Exception)

dnelson — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 03:03:00 GMT

Posts from the FxCop blog about catching general exception types generated a lot of controversy. I've posted about a particular comment which I think demonstrates a misunderstanding of what static code analysis "rules" are all about....(read more)

Collection Initializers and Duck Typing

dnelson — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 12:57:00 GMT

C# 3.0 will include a new language feature called collection initializers. But are the language designers going too far to make the feature usable by previously built classes?...(read more)