DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Rickasaurus

Thinking only of the Junior Developer

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:16:15 GMT

How do you treat Junior developers, what code do you give them, and do you let their presence change your architecture?

Visual Studio Debugging Feature - Tracepoints

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:31:04 GMT

A tracepoint is simply a breakpoint that will emit a debug trace statement when it is reached. It can emit things like the current function name, stack trace, or the contents of a variable. What's really cool is that you don't have to actually stop execution. This allows you to quickly add debugging statements without the need to check out your code or remember to take the Debug.WriteLine statements out afterwards.

Most Interesting .NET StackOverFlow Questions

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:46:02 GMT

Today a short list of My Personal Most Interesting .NET Questions to me asked on StackOverFlow I founded.

Principles of UI architecture for libraries

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:30:02 GMT

In this article we shall discuss some of the core tenets when creating UI frameworks/libraries and how these principles guides us in the development of Gaia. Gaia is an Ajax library for the ASP.NET platform. It takes a philosophically radical different approach than it's platform counterparts, including Microsoft's own ASP.NET Ajax framework.

Debugging With Tracepoints

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:31:04 GMT

Well, last week, while I saw John Cunninghams session at PDC 2008 about Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks, I learned something new about breakpoints. The Visual Studio debugger has another feature called tracepoints.

What is Microsoft waiting for providing a decent path API?

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:31:13 GMT

I was recently browsing the code source of Managed Extensibility Framework and realized that this future part of .NET 4, full of tricky and advanced ideas, was naively relying on strings to describe files and directories paths. It seems that the version 4 of .NET will miss the need for a descent path API. There is the class System.IO.Path but it is feature limited, full of flaws and pitfalls (to not say bugs) and it fosters users to encode their paths into raw strings. It seems to me that using strings to encode paths is as primitive as using String.IndexOf("<tag>") to parse some XML.

Raising Events the right way, the easy way, with an Extension Method

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 11:16:19 GMT

Raising events takes 3 lines of code. Let's follow the DRY principal and get that down to one line. Less noise, more action, very tastey. Merry Christmas.

How will you parallelize your existing codebase? Try R.A.S.P.

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:18:57 GMT

There has been much talk of how we will be writing all of our new code with parallelization in mind. However, what of our existing code? It's unlikely that everyone will just suddenly dump decades of existing code and write everything from scratch. In this article I'm going to provide a simple methodology for how we might deal with the ever building problem of parallelizing our existing mountains of code. Comments and contributions are welcome.

Dependency Injection: Modularize Your Services and Applications

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 04:42:02 GMT

Article that covers a simple dependency injection example, what it is, and why it can be a useful tool for your toolbox.

Getting good dumps when an exception is thrown

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:47:25 GMT

Unfortunately, the default way of catching exception give you a very useful dump in your error-report. The problem is that by the time the catch block has been started, the stack frames showing how the exception occurred are no longer available. Managed exceptions are built on Windows Structured Exception Handling, and so have the same two-pass model. 'catch' blocks are executed on the second pass, but really what we want here is to generate our error-report on the first-pass (before EBP gets reset)....

Free Tool For Managed and Unmanaged Deadlock Detection

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:16:12 GMT

Deadlocks are terribly difficult to find and even more difficult to debug. Debug Inspector is a free tool that allows you to view the call stacks of multiple threads at the same time, plugs in to the internals of the CLR and automatically detects deadlocks.

Performing Simple Interprocess Communication with Verbs

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:13:09 GMT

In this post I'll be discussing simple process interactions via ShellExecute API Verbs. Using Verbs will allow you to perform simple tasks on specific file types without having to worry about building a complex communication layer to a specific application.

How to handle .NET ReaderWriter locks efficiently?

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:35:30 GMT

Writing code for the concurrent execution requires, among over things, proper data access synchronization (locking) to avoid any problems. One of the most useful primitives to do that is the Slim version of ReaderWriterLock that has been introduced in .NET 3.5

Dynamic in C# Part VI: What Dynamic Does not Do

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:08:30 GMT

C# Engineer Sam Ng describes "What Dynamic Does not Do" in this sixth post in his excellent series on new features in C# 4.0

The Academic Background of the .NET Community Leaders

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:01:10 GMT

In this post Keyvan demonstrates the Academic background of most famous guys in the .NET community and talks about the various aspects of academic knowledge and its effect among technology leaders.

Is F# faster than C#

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:16:11 GMT

I had a bet with a co-worker that C# would out perform F# for a simple counting exercise. This turned out to be quite a surprise for many reasons. In this blog post I will try to explain why.

Yet another Singleton Yada-Yada

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:01:04 GMT

Using a static-constructor in a singleton, affects it's laziness. Here's a generic singleton that is thread-safe using a static-constructor, and still lazy.

IronPython 2.0 Has Been Released

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:16:08 GMT

Microsoft has released IronPython 2.0 on CodePlex, the .NET implementation of the Python language. The most important improvement is running on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).

Be a Keyboard Guru, not a Mouse Guru

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:46:17 GMT

If you are a developer who wants to improve your skills, do not just think of code & syntax. Have you ever been in front of a team lead or architect lead and they look like magicians when they code and you feel embarrassed when you pick up your mouse? I know I have. Well, it's not really anything fancy. They are not musicians even though it's intimidating when you are not that fast with the keyboard;

One PowerShell Script to download PDC2008 Videos, Code and PowerPoints

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:46:08 GMT

Yes I did it. I downloaded all 65,563,667,714 bytes and saved them as 407 files on my nice new WD Passport hard drive that I brought home from the PDC2008. And, yes I did it the old fashioned manual way: Right-Click on link and Save-As. But you don't have to do it. In this blog post I provide the metadata of all the files I downloaded and a PowerShell script that will help you automating the download process. Besides the PDC content you also get to a treasure trove of PowerShell scripting techniques ranging from dynamically generating Regular Expressions to loading meta-data form XML and CSV files.

Design and Testability

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:46:02 GMT

Another good one

More Image Processing with C# Lambdas

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:05:18 GMT

This is a continuation of the earlier post on image processing with C# lambda expressions. The previous blog describes a simple way to define image processing in terms of lambda expressions, and while efficient, it's missing the ability to do commands that examine pixels outside of the source pixel in order to compute the destination pixel. The way around this is to provide more information to the lambda expression.

Implementing a red black tree in C#

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 06:01:08 GMT

This article talks about how to implement a red-black tree in C#. The implementation is generic, and it also implements IEnumerable<T>.

Pimp My Debugger - DebuggerDisplay Attribute

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 06:46:10 GMT

The other day I was reading some friends code, and I saw that he used a DebuggerDisplay attribute. It allows you to create a custom view of your objects in the Visual studio debugger. This attribute is very straight forward, but very powerful in the amount of time it can save you when debugging your application. I'll show you a cookie cutter example, but you can use your imagination as to how to use this particular attribute.

Get SOLID: Single Responsibility Principle - Karl Seguin

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:31:02 GMT

SOLID is a popular acronym that refers to a set of 5 important class design principles. Today I want to talk about the first part of SOLID: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP).