This post is partly meant to be a general announcement, and partly meant to be something I can point people at in the future (rather than writing a short version of this on each email). These days, I get at least a few emails practically every day along the lines of: "I saw you on Stack Overflow, and would like you to answer this development question for me..." It's clear that the author: Is aware of Stack Overflow Is aware that Stack Overflow is a site for development Q&A Is aware

I'm getting fairly frequent questions - mostly on Twitter - about whether there's going to be a third edition of C# in Depth. I figure it's worth answering it once in some detail rather than repeatedly in 140 characters ;) I'm currently writing a couple of new chapters covering the new features in C# 5 - primarily async, of course. The current "plan" is that these will be added to the existing 2nd edition to create a 3rd edition. There will be minimal changes to the existing

This morning I was wrestling with trying to make some Noda Time unit tests faster. For some reason, the continuous integration host we're using is really slow at loading resources under .NET 4. The unit tests which run in 10 seconds on my home laptop take over three hours on the continuous integration system. Taking stack traces at regular intervals showed the problem was with the NodaFormatInfo constructor, which reads some resources. I may look into streamlining the resource access later, but

(Note that this is deliberately not posted in the Noda Time blog . I reckon it's of wider interest from a design perspective, and I won't be posting any of the equivalent Noda Time code. I'll just say now that we don't have this sort of craziness in Noda Time, and leave it at that...) A few weeks ago, I was answering a Stack Overflow question when I noticed an operation around dates and times which should have been losing information apparently not doing so. I investigated further

To some readers, the title of this post may induce nightmarish recollections of late-night debugging sessions. To others it may be simply the epitome of jargon. Just to break the jargon down a bit: Type initializer: the code executed to initialize the static variables of a class, and the static constructor Circular dependency: two bits of code which depend on each other - in this case, two classes whose type initializers each require that the other class is initialized A quick example of the kind

Earlier, I came across this Stack Overflow question . I solved it, tweeted it, but then thought it would serve as a useful case study into the mental processes I go through when trying to solve a problem - whether that's on Stack Overflow, at work, or at home. It's definitely worth reading the original question, but the executive summary is: When I compute the checksum/hash of c:\Windows\System32\Calc.exe using various tools and algorithms, those tools all give the same answer for each algorithm

A while I ago I blogged about what had changed under the hood of async between the CTP and the VS11 Preview. Well, now that the VS11 Beta is out, it's time to do it all again... Note that the code in this post is in the Eduasync codebase , under a different solution (Eduasync VS11.sln). Many of the old existing projects won't compile with VS11 beta, but I'd rather leave them as they are for posterity, showing the evolution of the feature. Stephen Toub has an excellent blog post covering

Noda Time is nearing v1.0, which means I'm spending more time writing documentation than code. It also means reviewing the APIs we've got with a critical eye - whether that's removing extraneous members, adding useful ones, or moving things around. (In particular, writing documentation often suggests where a change would make calling code read more naturally.) This post is about one particular section of the API, and the choices available. Although I do go into some detail around the

This is a slightly odd post, and before you read it you should probably put yourself into one of three buckets: Someone who doesn't care too much about functional programming, and finds higher order functions tricky: feel free to skip this post entirely. Someone who knows all about functional programming, and already knows the difference between currying and partial function application: please read this post carefully and post comments about any inaccuracies you find. (Yes, the CAPTCHA is broken

Today's post involves the MagicOrdering project in source control (project 28). When I wrote part 16 of Eduasync , showing composition in the form of majority voting, one reader mailed me a really interesting suggestion. We don't really need to wait for any of the tasks to complete on each iteration of the loop - we only need to wait for the next task to complete. Now that sounds impossible - sure, it's great if we know the completion order of the tasks, but half the point of asynchrony