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Mon, Jan 21 2013 11:11

IDisposable and Class Hierarchies

In my previous post , I showed how the Dispose Pattern is effectively obsolete. But, there’s one area that I didn’t really cover. What do you do when you want to create a class that implements IDisposable , doesn’t implement the Dispose...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 4 comment(s)
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Sun, Jan 20 2013 16:16

The Dispose Pattern as an anti-pattern

When .NET first came out, the framework only had abstractions for what seemed like a handful of Windows features. Developers were required to write their own abstractions around the Windows features that did not have abstractions. Working with these features...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 3 comment(s)
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Tue, Sep 11 2012 14:04

Thread synchronization of non-atomic invariants in .NET 4.5

Now that we’ve seen how a singular x86-x64 focus might affect how we can synchronize atomic invariants , let’s look at non-atomic invariants. While an atomic invariant really doesn’t need much in the way of guarding , non-atomic invariants often do. ...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 2 comment(s)
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Mon, Sep 10 2012 14:26

Thread synchronization of atomic invariants in .NET 4.5 clarifications

In Thread synchronization of atomic invariants in .NET 4.5 I’m presenting my observations of what the compiler does in very narrow context of only on Intel x86 and Intel x64 with a particular version of .NET. You can install SDKs that give you access...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 4 comment(s)
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Sun, Sep 9 2012 11:52

Thread synchronization of atomic invariants in .NET 4.5

I've written before about multi-threaded programming in .NET (C#). Spinning up threads and executing code on another thread isn't really the hard part. The hard part is synchronization of data between threads. Most of what I've written about...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 4 comment(s)
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Sat, Aug 25 2012 17:12

Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices published

Most of my spare time in the last few months has been taken up by writing Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices . This has now been published and is available through publisher (no longer pre-order) at http://bit.ly/Px43Pw . The pre-order price is still available...
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Fri, May 25 2012 12:51

Automated Testing Isn’t Just for Business Logic

I had a conversation with Kelly Sommers the other day that was partially a short support group session on the annoying tendencies of development teams to completely lose focus on the architecture and design principles of a system and let the code base...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 5 comment(s)
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Thu, Apr 26 2012 21:25

Dispose Pattern and “Set large fields to null”

I was involved in a short side discussion about “should” fields be set to null in the Dispose method(s).  I’m not sure what the impetus of the question was; but, if you read through the dispose pattern MSDN documentation (in most versions I believe...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 10 comment(s)
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Thu, Nov 24 2011 8:50

If You’re Using “#if DEBUG”, You’re Doing it Wrong

I was going through some legacy code the other day, refactoring it all over the place and I ran into many blocks of code wrapped in “#if DEBUG”.  Of course, after a bit of refactoring in a RELEASE configuration these blocks of code were quickly out...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 13 comment(s)
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Mon, Sep 19 2011 19:07

Windows 8, What Does It Mean to Me?

Well, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Microsoft Build conference that happened in Anaheim last week.  It was during this conference that Microsoft finally released details about the successor to Windows 7. ...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 3 comment(s)
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Wed, Feb 9 2011 18:20

Developing Windows Services in Visual Studio

Inevitably distributed systems often need a Windows service or two for certain tasks. The creation of a Windows service project and hooking up a project installer to the service is fairly straightforward; so, I’m not going to get into much detail...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 5 comment(s)
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Sat, Dec 11 2010 13:21

Unbind a Visual Studio 2010 Solution from Source Code Control

I was working with a solution that I got from someone else the other day.  When I loaded it up, Visual Studio 2010 informed me that it could not connect to a TFS server at some URL and will open the solution in offline mode (or something to that...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 5 comment(s)
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Thu, Nov 4 2010 11:26

Testing Strategies Involving Async Functions

Some things to keep in mind when writing units tests for code that use async methods: You're not trying to test the framework's "awaitability" and you're not trying to test framework methods that are "awaitable". You want...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 1 comment(s)
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Wed, Nov 3 2010 8:23

Deep Dive on Closure Pitfalls

I've blogged about closures in C# and their pitfalls before. I keep seeing problems with closures--more now that lambdas expressions and statements ("lambdas") are becoming more widespread--even with experienced developers. So, I'd thought...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 5 comment(s)
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Fri, Oct 29 2010 15:12

More on Async Functions

In my last post I showed .Net 1.1 and .NET 2.0 code that performed some asychronous operations. I then showed the new syntax with "async" and "await" that did the same thing. But, I didn't detail what's really going on in the...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 1 comment(s)
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Thu, Oct 28 2010 0:52

A New Asynchronicity Awaits You

The languages team at Microsoft have just announced that both VB and C# are giving first-class citizenship to asynchronous operations. At long last we can cleanly program for asynchronous operations without cluttering up the code with imperative artefacts...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 1 comment(s)
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Tue, Jun 15 2010 18:21

Visual Studio 2010, Enhance your Jedi Skillz

I’ve blogged about becoming a Jedi in Visual Studio 2008 before . Being a Jedi in Visual Studio means you focus more on adding value to the software you’re working with and less on the process of the IDE you’re doing your work in. Visual...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 2 comment(s)
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Thu, May 27 2010 11:37

Using the dynamic Keyword in C# to Improve Object Orientation – A Follow-up

Based on some feedback, some clarification is warranted with regard to my previous post titled “ Using the dynamic Keyword in C# to Improve Object Orientation ”. As Jarek Kowalski correctly pointed out, the example code that I provided could have used...
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Mon, May 24 2010 11:18

Using the dynamic Keyword in C# to Improve Object-Orientation

With polymorphism, object-oriented languages allow "...different data types to be handled using a uniform interface". Ad-hoc polymorphism is when you declare multiple methods of the same name but differ by the type of an argument. For example...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 5 comment(s)
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Sat, May 8 2010 15:32

Layers in Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 has a new featured called Layer Diagrams.  In the Ultimate edition you can create layer diagrams that model the logical layers in your software system. What is a Layer? I’m glad you asked what a layer is.  A layer is a logical...
Posted by PeterRitchie | 1 comment(s)
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