Month: January 2006

A thread came up yesterday on the C# newsgroup about when to use the “normal” foreach and when to use List<T>.ForEach (assuming, of course, that one is dealing with a List<T> in the first place). Obviously there are readability issues, but we ended up focusing on performance. (Isn’t that telling in its own right? How often is the iteration part rather than the body going to dominate and be a significant bottleneck? Anyway, I digress.) So, I wrote a small benchmark, and Patrick asked me to blog about it. I’ve refactored the test I posted on the newsgroup and added … Continue reading List<T>.ForEach vs foreach(…)

For a long time, when people have asked about having inheritance and singletons, I’ve stated flatly that a singleton can’t be derived from. It stops being a singleton at that point. Even if the class is internal and you can prove that no other classes in the assembly do derive from the singleton and break the pattern’s effect, it’s still not a genuine singleton. It was only when I was thinking about one of the comments about my enhanced enums proposal that I realised there’s an alternative approach. You can derive from a singleton as nested types of the Singleton … Continue reading Singletons and inheritance

This will be an evolving post, hopefully. (If no-one comments on it, it probably won’t change unless I come up with better ideas myself.) Since working on a Java project last year, I’ve been increasingly fed up with C#’s enums. They’re really not very object oriented: they’re not type-safe (you can cast from one enum to another via a cast to their common underlying type), they don’t allow any behaviour to be specified, etc. They’re just named constant integral values. Until I played with Java 1.5’s enum support, that wouldn’t have struck me as being a problem, but (at least … Continue reading Enhanced enums in C#