Feeling ashamed for keeping your clients waiting until your code finally constructs your heavy classes/forms?

This utility instantiates objects in a background thread and aspires to always be "full" to the capacity requested. Useful in cases the object being constructed uses many resources and is consumed frequently.

More...

Can there be code reuse in testing classes? Is code coverage the only measurement we have for test efficiency? Should our testing framework test design and meta-code as well as functionality?

More...

We often need to repeat some method calls, until some condition is met.

For example:

- Try to save a file, if it fails, try again, until it succeeds, but no more than 10 times in total.

- Ping a server, 100 times, and pause two seconds between each ping.

- Try to open a file, in a low-priority background thread, and when it succeeds, call some callback method, if it fails opening the file, try again, but call another callback method every time it fails.

And so on...

More...

Sometimes we need to find all classes or interfaces that derive a certain Type. There are several possible scenarios for this kind of search - For instance, if we are trying to load a plug-in assembly at runtime and wish to initialize all the classes that implement the IPluginBase interface. Using the suggested DerivedHelper makes it a lot easier.

More...

Here's a piece of code:

class BadCounter
{
    private int count;

    public int Inc
    {
        get { return ++count; }
    }
}

Lets leave the fact that this is the worst counter ever,

Can you spot the bug, without even knowing the requirements?

More...

I needed to create an "About" dialog for some application.

The dialog is required to display a list of all the application's assemblies, and their version numbers.

All the assemblies are signed using a single strong-name key (SNK file), and this is the only application that uses that key.

So I've decided to enumerate the GAC and search for all assemblies with the same key token as the running assembly's key token.

More...

Comparing enum values can sometime leave your code a little messy and inaccessible if you (once again) did not document it properly.

A short piece of code such as this will never be accepted with joy by any developer, especially not during those long debug sessions a moment before the weekend:

[Flags]
public enum Status
{
    None = 0,
    New = 1,
    InProcess = 2,
    Open = 4,
    Frozen = 8,
    Rejected = 16,
    Irrelevant = 32,
}

public bool ValidateStatusBeforeSending(Status status)
{
    // Missing elaborate documentation right HERE.
    return (status == Status.New ||
            (int)status & (Status.Open | Status.Rejected) == Status.None);
}

More...

I've decided it's time to stop the copy-paste madness.

More...

Params and arrays

Here's a C# quiz regarding params:

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        // case 1
        Foo(1, 2);

        // case 2
        Foo(new int[] { 1, 2 });

        // case 3
        Foo(new object[] { 1, 2 });
    }

    static void Foo(params object[] args)
    {
        // args?
    }
}

Can you tell what is the value of 'args' in each case?

Answers below...

More...

"What happened to the build machine?"

"Who broke the build?"

"Who fixed it?"

All these questions, and more, can be answered using a fun and cool method: "Biltons".

Well, a bilton, like a rington, is actually a wav file that will be played whenever something happens to the build machine ("Build-Tone").

More...