Buzzword Buster – CTP and RTM
Definition: CTP stands for Community Technology Preview, another fancy term for a ‘beta’ or ‘prototype’. RTM stands for Release To Manufacturing or Release To Market. References: Software release life cycle
Programming
Casting boxed value types in C#
I came across these two posts on Eric Lippert‘s blog yesterday which I found very interesting: Representation and Identity Cast operators do not obey the distributive law The blog posts go into a lot of details but long story short, if you box a value type you can’t unbox it to another type: It would …
.Net Tips – Xml Serialize or Deserialize Dictionary in C#
If you try to serialize/deserialize a type which uses the generic Dictionary<TKey, TValue> type with the XmlSerializer then you’ll get an InvalidOperationException, for instance: Here’s my class: I’ll get an InvalidOperationException with an inner exception of type NotSupportedException when I do this: And the error message of the NotSupportedException is: “Cannot serialize member MyClass.MyDictionary of …
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WCF – Improve performance with greater concurrency
As good and innovative as WCF is, it also introduced a lot of new complexities and whilst it is easy to get something up and running quickly it takes much more understanding to make your service perform as well as it could. There are many things you need to consider such as binding types, serialization …
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Understanding arithmetic overflow checking in C#
Default context = unchecked By default, arithmetic operations and conversions in C# are executed in an unchecked context. This means that for a signed integer it overflows from int.MaxValue to int.MinValue and underflows from int.MinValue to int.MaxValue, hence both statements below evaluates to true: Similarly, for an unsigned integer it will underflow from 0 to …
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Threading – thread-safe size capped queue
Here is a queue class based on the implementation Marc Gravell provided in this StackOverflow question:
HornGet – a place to get your OpenSource fix
Whilst listening to the latest .Net Rocks! podcast, I stumbled across HornGet, which is a site that provides pre-compiled binaries for well known open source projects such as NHibernate, RhinoMocks, etc. I posted a while back about the problems I had finding a build of NHibernate which works with both FluentNHibernate and Linq2NHibernate, only if …
Anders Hejlsberg’s podcast session with .Net Rocks!
Having just listened to a recent .Net Rocks! podcast with Anders Hejlsberg (chief architect of the C# language) in a fittingly named show, “Anders Hejlsberg blows our mind!”, I felt it worthwhile to note down some of the views Anders shared with us, and some nice quotes for you to use in your next geek …
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.Net Tips – Using custom ServiceThrottlingAttribute to specify WCF service throttling behaviour
If you have created a WCF service in the past then I assume you’re aware that WCF is very heavily configuration-driven and that you can specify the service behaviour including the throttling parameters (MaxConcurrentCalls, MaxConcurrentInstances, MaxConcurrentSessions) in the config file. But to specify the type of service (PerCall, PerSession or Singleton) you need to apply …
Buzzword Buster – Technical Debt
Yet another recurring phrase on DotNetRocks’s podcasts, and a catchy one at that! The term ‘technical debt’ was coined by Ward Cunningham to describe the eventual consequences a software development organization incurs when it chooses to do things the quick and dirty way, which benefits the short-term but increases complexity and ultimately is more costly …