February 2006 Entries
My valentine will always be my dear and loving wife, but there's another partner who brings joy into my life. Before you came along, with charms that often IEnumerate, I'd type a name, and then a "dot", then sit and wait...and wait...and wait... The screen remained as empty as my heart before you, love, but now, my dearest angel, you drop down from heav'n above suggesting members, properties, and methods with such great sense that we, like longtime lovers, finish one another's statements. Though...
Posted On Monday, February 13, 2006 9:29 AM | Feedback (0)
There's a nice video from last week's VSLive presentation on the Fawcette web site: Outlining the Future of Software Chappell & Associates' David Chappell detailed the design patterns for a new breed of service-oriented applications to a standing-room-only crowd at VSLive! on Tuesday. See how to combine Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation to create fourth-generation apps. You have to be registered with the site to view the presentation - I don't remember if that's...
Posted On Wednesday, February 08, 2006 3:09 PM | Feedback (0)
D'Arcy from Winnipeg wishes C# had a “with” statement. Me, too. I've moved from VB6 to C# and am glad of it, but I really miss the old VB With/EndWith. It's great for "chatty" interfaces, expecially the ability to nest With's to update "grandchild" properties: With myCustomer .FirstName = "Phillip" .LastName = "Fry" .MiddleInitial = "J" .Age = 1024 With .Address .AddressLine1 = "3000 Farnsworth Avenue" .City = "New New York City" .State = "NY" .Zip = "101010001100011" .Country = "USA"...
Posted On Tuesday, February 07, 2006 9:23 AM | Feedback (0)
The St. Louis event on February 2, 2006 was ably presented by Jacob Cynamon. Session 1: Building Mobile Applications with Visual Studio 2005 The video that was shown to start off this session was a waste of time - A Benetton ad group of hipper-than-thou soul-patches zipping around a conference room on Segways, allegedly whipping together a mobile app in three days, while communicating with their customer as she purposefully strode around town ignoring incoming traffic while clicking on her smart...
Posted On Monday, February 06, 2006 3:38 PM | Feedback (0)
fahrenheit = centigrade * 9 / 5 + 32; How is the C# statement above evaluated? fahrenheit = (centigrade * 9) / (5 + 32); fahrenheit = centigrade * (9 / 5) + 32; fahrenheit = (centigrade * (9 / 5) + 32; fahrenheit = ((centigrade * 9) / 5) + 32; fahrenheit = centigrade * (9 / (5 + 32)); The correct answer is 4, but please “don't make me think“ when coding math expressions. If your programming language allows parentheses (and I don't know of one that doesn't), why not use them to make the...
Posted On Friday, February 03, 2006 7:41 AM | Feedback (4)
"They look like cartoon characters cursing" - Mark Dunn, on regular expressions. "I'm higher than a California condor on ecstasy!" The man has a way with words. It's good to hear Mark Dunn on .NET Rocks again!
Posted On Wednesday, February 01, 2006 7:43 PM | Feedback (0)
I just stumbled across the new .ForEach methods in .NET 2.0 for Array and the new generic collection objects. Instead of: GeekWithBlog[] geeks = GetGeekArray(); foreach (GeekWithBlog geek in geeks) { RaiseSalary(geek); } } private void RaiseSalary(GeekWithBlog geek) { geek.Salary *= 2; } ... you can now code: GeekWithBlog[] geeks = GetGeekArray(); Array.ForEach(geeks, RaiseSalary); } private void RaiseSalary(GeekWithBlog geek) { geek.Salary *= 2; } Combined with anonymous methods, this could either...
Posted On Wednesday, February 01, 2006 4:32 AM | Feedback (1)
Ram Shankar Yadav shared a handy tip the other day for finding documentation about .NET types on MSDN2. You can just browse to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/... (fully qualified type name). For example: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/...system.web.ui.webcontrols.textbox.aspx I've already used this several times, and am considering writing a Visual Studio add-in to automate it. Thanks, Ram...
Posted On Wednesday, February 01, 2006 4:27 AM | Feedback (2)