Archives

Archives / 2004 / May
  • Twenty twenty twenty four hours to go...

    And I'm TechEd bound. The new tablet has VPC images waiting to be filled up. I can finally blog about VS Team System, the Information Bridge Framework looks nifty from the outside (the download page has a lucid 3-line description, skip the fluff), and I can't wait for TechEd Bingo. Marcie's even hosting a Birds of a Feather session (Wednesday 7:00 PM- 8:00 PM, 14A). It promises to be a fun week. Hope to meet a bunch of you there!

  • System.Exception and System.ApplicationException

    There remains confusion over what to inherit from when creating custom exceptions. Best-practises opinions range from the .NET Framework documentation: “If you are designing an application that needs to create its own exceptions, derive from the ApplicationException class,” through to the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference (Vol.1): “You should not define new exception classes derived from ApplicationException; use Exception instead. In addition, you should not write code that catches ApplicationException.” So which is it?

  • Random Numbers in C#

    Random number generators written in code (or any deterministic algorithm) aren't really random. You could go as far as to say that unless based on nondeterministic events at a quantum level, there will (theoretically) be a way of predicting the next number in a series. Taking it this far might sound silly, but it gets the point across.