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• .NET
• C#
• C# duck_typing LINQ
• dynamic_typing

• Magic Booleans

  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... Posted Monday, August 11, 2008 6:55 PM by dnelson | 2 Comments

• Dynamic Typing and a Tale of Two Interviews

  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... Posted Monday, April 28, 2008 10:08 PM by dnelson | 2 Comments Filed under: dynamic_typing

• Why I Hate Marketing

  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... Posted Monday, April 28, 2008 2:07 PM by dnelson | 1 Comments Filed under: .NET

• WPF Attached Dependency Properties and Roles

  Attached Dependency Properties in WPF are a replacement for extender providers in WinForms, but they may also have other interesting applications. Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2008 12:28 AM by dnelson | 1 Comments

• LINQ and Duck Typing

  C# 3.0 saw the increasing use of duck typing, most prominently in LINQ. Read More... Posted Friday, March 07, 2008 11:17 AM by dnelson | 3 Comments Filed under: C# duck_typing LINQ

• Programming and Chess

  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... Posted Friday, February 22, 2008 1:01 AM by dnelson | 1 Comments

• C# vs VB.NET

  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... Posted Friday, November 09, 2007 2:53 AM by dnelson | 3 Comments

• C# Language Design Decisions Explained

  "Ask A Language Designer" on MSDN explains design decisions made by the C# language team. Read More... Posted Friday, November 02, 2007 12:22 AM by dnelson | 0 Comments Filed under: C#

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

  An article about Hungarian notation and a summary of my opinions on the issue. Read More... Posted Thursday, January 11, 2007 1:06 PM by dnelson | 4 Comments

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

  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... Posted Friday, December 22, 2006 2:05 AM by dnelson | 0 Comments

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

  Dealing with the "project location is not trusted" warning in Visual Studio, when the project in question is on a local drive. Read More... Posted Monday, December 18, 2006 3:26 PM by dnelson | 13 Comments

• catch(Exception)

  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... Posted Saturday, December 16, 2006 6:03 AM by dnelson | 1 Comments

• Collection Initializers and Duck Typing

  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... Posted Saturday, December 09, 2006 3:57 PM by dnelson | 3 Comments