onezero

Did you ever notice the redundancy that’s forced by C#’s syntax for invoking and defining constructors? using System.Collections.Generic; class Thing { Thing(int x, int y) { … } public static void Main() { Thing a = new Thing(3,2); Dictionary<string,double> b = new Dictionary<string,double>(); } } It might be nice if C# added a less redundant […]

Posted on February 25th, 2007 by Andrew
Under C# / Common Language Infrastructure | 3 Comments »

The essential ideas of using permalinks to avoid link rot have been around much longer than since the term permalink came into common use. The term permalink appears to have originated around the year 2000, and was widely used only after that. Tim Berners-Lee wrote an article about the essential ideas in 1998, and one […]

Posted on February 25th, 2007 by Andrew
Under Accessibility | No Comments »

Sometimes one comes across the following guideline for C# structs: All structs should be immutable. The results of searching the web for justification for this are not very satisfying. One argument sometimes advanced is that an immutable struct is usually simpler to understand than a mutable struct. This argument is true, but it also applies […]

Posted on February 19th, 2007 by Andrew
Under C# / Common Language Infrastructure | 2 Comments »

When a method takes a boolean argument, it is sometimes better to restructure the method so that it takes an enumeration argument. In this article we show that the real benefit of this is not obvious and is often misunderstood. Consider the following method and one of its clients: void search(bool useCaseSensitiveSearch) { … } […]

Posted on February 19th, 2007 by Andrew
Under C# / Common Language Infrastructure | No Comments »

People sometimes wonder about the origin of my domain name onezero.org. Here’s how I chose it. Some time around when I left grad school, I realized that it was good to have one’s own domain instead of relying on a school or company or something else to store it. I spent the better part of […]

Posted on February 19th, 2007 by Andrew
Under Personal | No Comments »

In C#, it is good practice to make the Equals method commute.  But even the Base Class Library fails to do this sometimes.  It’s possible to have a.Equals(b) != b.Equals(a) even with primitive types, e.g, when a is a Single (a float) and b is an Int32. http://blogs.msdn.com/jmstall/archive/2005/03/23/401038.aspx

Posted on February 19th, 2007 by Andrew
Under C# / Common Language Infrastructure | No Comments »