Recently I implemented a Chain of Responsibility in C# and decided to modify it a bit for my application, since the original pattern favours object hierarchies heavily and I wanted to use it in a flat context. With flat I mean that I have a bunch of handlers and I don't have a fixed order for going through...

Thanks to NUnit , unit-testing in a .NET-environment is really easy. With good tools however, it's still fairly easy to make stupid mistakes. One of the things I've learned when constructing unit-tests is that you shouldn't reuse testing code to create the actual code. Ofcourse that's obvious, but in...

I've just submitted my first Visual C# Express Beta 1 bug ! It has to do with automatic formatting, for which there are luckily lots of options in this new version. I barely customized anything though, because I'm very much used to the way VS.NET 2002 and 2003 do it by default. Today was the first day...

There are several ways to create XML files using the .NET FCL, but none of the standard methods allows simple extension of an existing file, such as a logfile, without needing to put the entire file into memory first (because that's what would happend if I use the DOM to add nodes somewhere near the...

Scott recently discovered one of my favorite syntactic niceties in C# 2.0, the Null Coalescing Operator. This operator allows you to return the left side of the statement if it is not null, otherwise return what is on the right. In other words, instead of writing code like this: if (o != null ) return...

Microsoft has released the first CTP for ADO.NET vNext which implements their vision for an Entity Framework to simplify data access. The ADO.NET Entity Framework supports Object Relational Mapping scenarios using ADO.NET Entities, in this build you can: Query of persistent Entities using LINQ to Entities...

I don’t know when it started or why, but I love Halloween (and autumn for that matter). So keeping the tradition of Halloween alive, I’ve decided to share some “horror” stories from the software/IT field over the next few weeks. The SQL Timeout… A few years ago, myself...

I don’t know when it started or why, but I love Halloween (and autumn for that matter). So keeping the tradition of Halloween alive, I’ve decided to share some “horror” stories from the software/IT field over the next few weeks. The SQL Timeout… A few years ago, myself...

Microsoft has released the first CTP for ADO.NET vNext which implements their vision for an Entity Framework to simplify data access. The ADO.NET Entity Framework supports Object Relational Mapping scenarios using ADO.NET Entities, in this build you can: Query of persistent Entities using LINQ to Entities...

Scott recently discovered one of my favorite syntactic niceties in C# 2.0, the Null Coalescing Operator. This operator allows you to return the left side of the statement if it is not null, otherwise return what is on the right. In other words, instead of writing code like this: if (o != null ) return...