C#, VS Deployment and all geek talk : How To

My Faq on "hashtable lookups for struct types" is published at http://blogs.msdn.com/CSharpFaq

Vipul Patel — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 15:48:00 GMT

Check out

http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/archive/2006/03/20/556192.aspx

for a FAQ on Hashtable lookup for value types.

Guidelines on clean up code

Vipul Patel — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 19:14:00 GMT

Many a times, we use the catch block inside the try catch block for our clean up code.

Something like

try

{

// Do something

}

catch

{

// work failed, clean up code here
}

Rather than the above approach of using the catch block, it would be nicer to use the finally block, something like

bool workSuccessful = false;

try

{

// do some work

workSuccessful = true;

}

finally

{

if(!workSuccessfull)

{

// cleanup code here.

}

There is elegance in the latter method and I would certainly recommend that approach, if you cannot use "using". See below for details.

PS: Use this approach only if better alternatives are not available. One of the automatic cleanup approaches available with C# is the using construct.

Something like,

using (TextReader tr = new StreamReader("FileName"))

{

// do my work here.

}

The “using” construct automatically clean up the unmanaged resource (TextReader) once the block has completed execution.

In the event that you cannot use "using", the try-finally approach would be the best way.

How to: Determining programmatically if DLL is registered

Vipul Patel — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:02:00 GMT

Here is a C# code snippet to determine if a particular DLL is registered or not.

[DllImport("kernel32")]

public extern static int LoadLibrary(string lpLibFileName);

[DllImport("kernel32")]

public extern static bool FreeLibrary(int hLibModule);

public bool IsDllRegistered(string DllName)

{

int libId = LoadLibrary(DllName);

if (libId>0) FreeLibrary(libId);

return (libId>0);

}

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/asanto

Visual Studio 2005 - A Guided Tour

Vipul Patel — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 00:30:00 GMT

Want to learn more about Visual Studio 2005.

MSDN magazine folks have come up with a new issue dedicated solely to the new IDE.

Check it out online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/00/default.aspx