Having installed Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 on my freshly-reinstalled netbook (now with Windows 7 and and SSD – yummy) I found that my solution file from Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 wasn’t recognised properly : double-clicking on the file didn’t do anything. Opening the solution file manually was absolutely fine, but slightly less convenient than being able to double-click. After a bit of investigation, I’ve found the solution. Manually edit the solution file, and change the first few lines from this

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 iterator blocks hide the details when you want to implement the interfaces. However, sometimes details matter - such as for this recent Stack Overflow question . The question asks how to create a

(I tweeted a brief version of this suggestion and the results have been overwhelmingly positive so far, but I thought it would be worth fleshing out anyway.) I'm currently editing chapter 3 of C# in Depth. In the first edition, it's nearly 48 pages long - the longest in the book, and longer than I want it to be. One of the sections in there (only 6 pages, admittedly) is a description of various .NET 2.0 collections. However, it's mostly comparing them with the nongeneric collections from

It's with some sadness that I have to announce that as of the start of October, I'm no longer a Microsoft MVP. As renewal time came round again, I asked my employer whether it was okay for me to renew, and was advised not to do so. As a result, while I enjoyed being awarded as an MVP, I've asked not to be considered for renewal this year. This doesn't mean I'm turning my back on that side of software development, of course. I'm still going to be an active member of the C#

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 basic idea was to take a completely empty struct, and use that as the element type in the results of a grouping query - as the struct was empty, it would take no space, therefore "huge" arrays

So, UnconstrainedMelody is coming on quite nicely. It now has quite a few useful options for flags enums, "normal enums" and delegates. However, there are two conflicting limitations which leave a couple of options. (Other related answers on Stack Overflow have suggested alternative approaches, basically.) Currently, most of the enums code is in two classes: Flags and Enums. Both are non-generic: the methods within them are generic methods, so they have type parameters (and constraints

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[]) Enum.GetValues( typeof (T)); } This is a pity, as such a method could be useful. (In fact there are better things we can do... such as returning a read-only collection. That way we don't have to

It's been a little while since I've blogged, and quite a lot has been going on. In fact, there are a few things I'd have blogged about already if it weren't for "things" getting in the way. Rather than writing a whole series of very short blog posts, I thought I'd wrap them all up here... C# in Depth: next MEAP drop available soon - Code Contracts Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on my writing dilemma . For the moment, the plan is to have a whole chapter about Code

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 giant in the Java world... and that's both the problem and the opportunity. There's no-one of quite the equivalent stature in the .NET world. Instead, there are many very smart people, a lot

I'd like some feedback from readers, and I suspect my blog is the simplest way to get it. I'm currently writing chapter 15 of C# in Depth, tentatively about Code Contracts and Parallel Extensions. The problem is that I'm 15 pages in, and I haven't finished Code Contracts yet. I suspect that with a typesetter moving the listings around a little it can be shortened a little bit, but I'm still concerned. With the amount I've still got to write, Code Contracts is going to end