October 2012 Entries
So this week I decided I’d do a Little Wonder of a different kind and focus on an underused IDE improvement: Visual Studio’s Box Selection capability. This is a handy feature that many people still don’t realize was made available in Visual Studio 2010 (and beyond). True, there have been other editors in the past with this capability, but now that it’s fully part of Visual Studio we can enjoy it’s goodness from within our own IDE. So, for those of you who don’t know what box selection is and what ......
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Today’s little wonder is another of those small items that can help a lot in certain situations, especially when writing generics. In particular, it is useful in determining what the default value of a given type would be. The Problem: what’s the default value ......
Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance ......
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Often times in our code we deal with the bigger classes and types in the BCL, and occasionally forgot that there are some nice methods on the primitive types as well. Today we will discuss some of the handy static methods that exist on the char (the C# alias of ......