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"Magic" null argument testing

Warning: here be dragons. I don't think this is the right way to check for null arguments, but it was an intriguing idea. Today on Stack Overflow, I answered a question about checking null arguments . The questioner was already using an extension similar to my own one in MiscUtil , allowing code...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Wed, Dec 9 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, Stack Overflow, Evil Code
Contract classes and nested types within interfaces

I've just been going through some feedback for the draft copy of the second edition of C# in Depth. In the contracts section, I have an example like this: [ContractClass( typeof (ICaseConverterContracts))] public interface ICaseConverter { string Convert( string text); ...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Sat, Oct 31 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, Books, C# 4
Iterating atomically

The IEnumerable<T> and IEnumerator<T> interfaces in .NET are interesting. They crop up an awful lot, but hardly anyone ever calls them directly - you almost always use a foreach loop to iterate over the collection. That hides all the calls to GetEnumerator(), MoveNext() and Current. Likewise...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Fri, Oct 23 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, Parallelisation, Stack Overflow
An object lesson in blogging and accuracy; was: Efficient "vote counting" with LINQ to Objects - and the value of nothing

Well, this is embarrassing. Yesterday evening, I excitedly wrote a blog post about an interesting little idea for making a particular type of LINQ query (basically vote counting) efficient. It was an idea that had occurred to me a few months back, but I hadn't got round to blogging about it. The...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Sun, Sep 20 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, LINQ
Generic constraints for enums and delegates

As most readers probably know, C# prohibits generic type constraints from referring to System.Object, System.Enum, System.Array, System.Delegate and System.ValueType. In other words, this method declaration is illegal: public static T[]GetValues<T>() where T : struct, System.Enum { return (T[]...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Thu, Sep 10 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, Stack Overflow
The "dream book" for C# and .NET

This morning I showed my hand a little on Twitter . I've had a dream for a long time about the ultimate C# book. It's a dream based on Effective Java , which is my favourite Java book, along with my experiences of writing C# in Depth. Effective Java is written by Josh Bloch, who is an absolute...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Thu, Aug 20 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, Books
Faking COM to fool the C# compiler

C# 4 has some great features to make programming against COM components bearable fun and exciting. In particular: PIA linking allows you to embed just the relevant bits of the Primary Interop Assembly into your own assembly, so the PIA isn't actually required at execution time Named arguments and...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Tue, Jul 7 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, Books, C# 4, Stack Overflow
A different approach to inappropriate defaults

I've had a couple of bug reports about my Protocol Buffers port - both nicely detailed, and one including a patch to fix it. (It's only due to my lack of timeliness in actually submitting the change that the second bug report occurred. Oops.) The bug was in text formatting (although it also affected...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Thu, May 14 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Java, Wacky Ideas
Go on, ask me anything

This afternoon, I found a comment which had been trapped in the spam bin for this blog. It was from Andrew Rimmer, in reply to my "micro-celebrity" post , pointing me at http://askjonskeet.com The world has officially become extremely silly. The surprising thing is, it's actually useful...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Tue, Mar 24 2009
Filed under: Filed under: Wacky Ideas, Stack Overflow
Breaking Liskov

Very recently, Barbara Liskov won the Turing award , which makes it a highly appropriate time to ponder when it's reasonable to ignore her most famous piece of work, the Liskov Substitution (or Substitutability) Principle . This is not idle speculation: I've had a feature request for MiscUtil...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Mon, Mar 16 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, General, Wacky Ideas
RFID: What I really want it for

This isn't really coding related, but it's technology related at least. There's been a lot of fuss made about how great or awful RFID is and will be in the future, in terms of usefuless and privacy invasion respectively. There's one use which I haven't seen discussed, but which seems...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Sat, Jan 24 2009
Filed under: Filed under: General, Wacky Ideas
Quick rant: why isn't there an Exception(string, params object[]) constructor?

This Stack Overflow question has reminded me of something I often wish existed in common exception constructors - an overload taking a format string and values. For instance, it would be really nice to be able to write: throw new IOException( "Expected to read {0} bytes but only {1} were available"...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Fri, Jan 23 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, General, Wacky Ideas, Stack Overflow
Horrible grotty hack: returning an anonymous type instance

One of the reasons I don't view anonymous types as being too bad is that they're nicely confined to methods. You can't declare the type that you're returning from a method if it's anonymous (or if one of its type arguments is generic, e.g. a List<T> where T is an anonymous type...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Fri, Jan 9 2009
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas
Value types and parameterless constructors

There have been a couple of questions on StackOverflow about value types and parameterless constructors: Structure vs Class in C# Why can’t I define a default constructor for a struct in .NET I learned quite a bit when answering both of these. When a further question about the default value of a type...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Wed, Dec 10 2008
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, CSharpDevCenter, CSharpDev
Redesigning System.Object/java.lang.Object

I've had quite a few discussions with a colleague about some failures of Java and .NET. The issue we keep coming back to is the root of the inheritance tree. There's no doubt in my mind that having a tree with a single top-level class is a good thing, but it's grown a bit too big for its...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Fri, Dec 5 2008
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Java, Wacky Ideas, CSharpDevCenter, CSharpDev
Jaffa bugs

Currently I'm working on a problem found by one of our testers. Unfortunately, it's hard to reproduce. Inspired by the fact that yesterday our micro-kitchen had jaffa cakes in, I propose that if we're going to be frustrated by bugs like this, we might as well at least mock them. I propose...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Thu, Nov 6 2008
Filed under: Filed under: General, Wacky Ideas
C# 4.0: dynamic<T> ?

I've not played with the VS2010 CTP much yet, and I've only looked briefly at the documentation and blogs about the new C# 4.0 dynamic type, but a thought occurred to me: why not have the option of making it generic as a way of saying "I will dynamically support this set of operations"...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Thu, Oct 30 2008
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, C# 4, CSharpDevCenter, CSharpDev
I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Cluestick

Unless you've listened to I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue , the BBC Radio 4 "antidote to panel games" which was chaired by the recently departed (and much missed) Humphrey Lyttelton , this post may not make a lot of sense to you. That's not intended to guarantee that it'll make...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Fri, Jun 20 2008
Filed under: Filed under: General, Wacky Ideas
Mandelbrot revisited - benchmark edition

I've had fun with the Mandelbrot set in this blog before, using it as an example of an embarrassingly parallelisable problem and demonstrating Parallel LINQ with it. This morning, over breakfast, I described the problem to Christian Brunschen , a colleague of mine who has some parallelisation experience...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Sun, May 18 2008
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, LINQ, Parallelisation
Visualising the Mandelbrot set with LINQ - yet again

I've been thinking about ranges again, particularly after catching a book error just in time, and looking at Marc's generic complex type . It struck me that my previous attempts were all very well, and demonstrated parallelisation quite neatly, but weren't very LINQy. In particular, they...

Posted to Jon Skeet: Coding Blog by skeet on Tue, Feb 26 2008
Filed under: Filed under: C#, Wacky Ideas, LINQ, Parallelisation

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