Let’s say we have a class called ShoppingCartItem. We’re going to concern ourselves with two properties here namely TaxID and Taxable. The business logic dictates that an item is definitely non-taxable if it has a tax-id of zero, otherwise it may or may not be taxable which is decided by some code situated outside the… [Read more…]
October 24, 2008
There should be a compiler supported way in C# to declare a property with custom getter/setter logic without having to explicitly declare a backing field. In the absence of such a feature, if you want to have custom getter/setter logic you have to ditch automatic properties, declare a backing field explicitly and then there’s nothing stopping a… [Read more…]
July 22, 2008
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…]
May 1, 2008
I am fortunate enough to work with a couple of great individuals. Recently I was able to hypnotize persuade them into discussing things which should and shouldn’t be done in a software project I am absolutely sure that the discussion will help me in the future (and them). However I thought the merged list is… [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 28, 2008
There is some misinformation you’re likely to stumble upon via Google when searching for “C# compiler /optimize+”. Interestingly, the following snippet can be seen on various forums. The following is a response from a developer on the C# compiler team: We get rid of unused locals (i.e., locals that are never read, even if assigned).… [Read more…]
April 26, 2008
Found someone using Google to figure out how to clear out the contents of a file and hitting my blog. Well, it’s pretty easy – use FileMode.Truncate when opening the file.
April 26, 2008
FileStream.Position property is implemented in terms of File.Seek (essentially File.Seek(value, SeekOrigin.Begin)). Consequently setting the location of the virtual file-pointer by calling Seek directly instead of calling Position results in slightly faster execution speed. Seek is also better because it has more options.
October 29, 2008
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