Had to do a bit of head-scratching on this one. New projects created in Visual Studio 2008 did show the “Add Service Reference” when right-clicking on a project in Solution Explorer while some existing ones didn’t. Using “Add Web Reference” instead of “Add Service Reference” has its own set of issues in that WCF services… [Read more…]
June 10, 2008
I was describing how a simple yet extensible report-generator could be implemented quickly to somebody. I’m posting it here as some of you might find it useful (and I can refer to this link in future conversations ). The concept: …is really simple. The idea is to look for a placeholder like @Fruit and replace… [Read more…]
June 6, 2008
What’ll be the output of the following piece of code (asked here)? One might expect… True True But what you’d actually get is… False False …because of boxing. a.Add(1) boxes the integer 1 into an object and stores it in a, while b.Add(1) boxes the integer 1 into a separate object and stores it in… [Read more…]
April 29, 2008
Try-Catch-Finally A try-catch-finally is converted into IL by the C# compiler as a try-catch inside the try block of another try-finally. This allows for finally block to execute even when exceptions are raised in the catch block. Use ildasm and check it out yourself! throw football; Though you cannot throw an arbitrary managed object as… [Read more…]
April 24, 2008
In an internal meeting of a bunch of developers at my current company, someone made the assertion that the Switch statement in C# (or Select Case in VB.NET) is just a compiler short-cut for writing a chain of If-Then-Else statements. What do you think? Is that statement – true or false? Take the following C#… [Read more…]
April 16, 2008
Problem: Consider the following generic function written in VB.NET: What message do you expect to be shown by the following bit of code? Would the “Foo” method even compile? It doesn’t make sense to assign a Nothing (VB.NET equivalent of C#’s null) to a value-type, right? Solution: Well, the code compiles just fine. When synthesizing… [Read more…]
April 14, 2008
Problem: Do warning bells go off in your head when you see code like the following? Are there any problems you need to be aware of when declaring events inside structures? Solution: Well, code like the following wouldn’t work, even though it seems to be perfectly reasonable. foo_SomeEvent will actually never be called. Why? Remember… [Read more…]
April 10, 2008
Problem: I had used .NET Mass Downloader tool to download .NET 2.0 Framework sourcecode some time ago. While reading Timer.cs (System.Windows.Forms.Timer) and a couple of other classes I noticed something interesting. Does the following piece of code look odd to you? Notice the empty “try” block and all processing being done in the “finally” block.… [Read more…]
April 8, 2008
Problem: .NET 2.0 introduced the GZipStream class to allow programmatic compression and decompression of files. However that class doesn’t provide an easy way for us to determine if a file is actually a compressed file. Decompressing the entire file just to determine if a file is actually compressed is wasteful. Solution: Most files have a… [Read more…]
January 10, 2008
If you’re reading this article, you’re most probably familiar with the InvokeRequired property on Windows.Forms.Control class which we have to use whenever setting a property on a Windows Forms control from a thread other than the one it was created on. Here is what the MSDN page about InvokeRequired says: Controls in Windows Forms are… [Read more…]
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July 22, 2008
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