Archives
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Multi-value Dictionary C# source code (.NET 3.5)
By popular demand, I've published the C# source code of my Multi-value Dictionary class, which can also merge dictionaries into itself and which implements ILookup<T, V> as well. It's part of Algorithmia, our upcoming data-structure and algorithm library which will ship with LLBLGen Pro v3.0 later this year. The code is released under the BSD2 license, see the enclosed readme.txt. The class comes with its own general purpose Grouping<T, V> class as well and of course its own ToMultiValueDictionary() extension method.
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The desperate quest for doing it 'right'
This morning I ran into an interesting design decision. The problem at hand isn't that interesting, I've solved it a lot of times before. The interesting thing is that this problem isn't always solved the same way. It goes like this: do you tell an element which is inside a container (which can be inside another container) to exclude (remove) itself from its container or do you tell the container to exclude (remove) the element? This might sound simple enough, but what is the right thing to do here? And if one is chosen, on what ground is that approach the right thing and is that always the case, no matter what the scenario might be? No, "It depends" doesn't cut it, for the sole reason that every single day probably millions of developers around the world are, in any state of desperation, searching for the right thing to do, be it for this or other problems. Check the various Q&A sites, the various newsgroups and above all, the wide range of developer blogs, articles and twitter channels, and you'll see that a lot has been, is and will be discussed about that single concept: the right thing.