Month: March 2008

Book review: C# 3.0 in a Nutshell

By jonskeet

Resources: Book’s web site (includes various tools such as LINQPad) Amazon Errata Introduction The original C# in a Nutshell was the book I cut my C# teeth on, so to speak. Basically I read it (well, the bits which weren’t just reproductions of MSDN – gone in this edition, thankfully), played around in Visual Studio, and then started to answer questions on the C# newsgroup. (That’s a great way of learning useful things, by the way – find another person’s problem which sounds like it’s one you might face in the future, then research the answer.) Five and a half … Continue reading Book review: C# 3.0 in a Nutshell

Range variables – is it just me that thinks they’re different?

By jonskeet

Update: Ian Griffiths has a more detailed blog post about this matter. Range variables are the variables used in query expressions. For instance, consider the expression: from name in nameslet length = name.Lengthselect new { name, length } Here, name and length are range variables. In C# in Depth, I claim that range variables aren’t like any other type of variable. Eric commented that they’re not unlike iteration variables in foreach – and since then, I’ve seen both Jamie King/Bruce Eckel’s book, and now C# 3.0 in a Nutshell (which is very good, by the way), using “iteration variable” as the … Continue reading Range variables – is it just me that thinks they’re different?

PostSharp and iterator blocks – a beautiful combination

By jonskeet

I’ve blogged before about the issue of validating parameters in methods implemented with iterator blocks. Tonight, I’ve found a nice way of doing it (in common situations, anyway). This morning I looked into PostSharp for the first time. PostSharp is an assembly post-processor, giving build-time AOP. I haven’t had any experience with AOP on .NET, but execution time AOP has always felt slightly risky to me. I wouldn’t like to say exactly why, and it may well be mere superstition – but I’m much happier with a tool modifying my code statically after a build than something messing around with … Continue reading PostSharp and iterator blocks – a beautiful combination

Book review: Head First C#

By jonskeet

Important "versioning" note This review tackles the first printing, from November 2007. Since then, the book has undergone more printings, with errata being fixed in each printing. I believe most or possibly all of the errors listed below are now fixed – although I don’t yet know whether there are more lurking. I have a recent (late 2009) printing which I intend to review when I have the time – which means it’s likely to be in 2010Q2 at the earliest, and more likely later. I don’t know how much editing has been done in terms of best/bad practice. I … Continue reading Book review: Head First C#

Book review/preview: "C# Query Expressions And Supporting Features in C# 3.0" (Eckel/King)

By jonskeet

Introduction Let me make one thing very clear before anything else: this is a preview. Bruce Eckel has made the preview of what appears to be part of a bigger book available free from his website. The book is by Bruce Eckel and Jamie King, and the preview available (1.0 at the time of writing) covers the following topics: Extension methods Implicitly typed local variables Automatic properties Implicitly-typed arrays Object initializers Collection initializers Anonymous types Lambda expressions Query expression translation For obvious reasons, this had me slightly worried when I first looked at it – it’s clearly a reasonably direct … Continue reading Book review/preview: "C# Query Expressions And Supporting Features in C# 3.0" (Eckel/King)

C# 4: Immutable type initialization

By jonskeet

(I’m giving up with the numbering now, unless anyone particularly wants me to keep it up. What was originally going to be a limited series appears to be growing without end…) As Chris Nahr pointed out in my previous post, my earlier idea about staged initialization was very half-baked. As he’s prompted me to think further about it, I’ve come up with another idea. It’s slightly more baked, although there are lots of different possibilities and open questions. Let’s take a step back, and look at my motivation: I like immutable types. They’re handy when it comes to thread safety, … Continue reading C# 4: Immutable type initialization

Reviewing other C# books?

By jonskeet

Just a quick question, really – I’d really like feedback to this one. This morning I was reading Charlie Calvert’s blog, and saw a link to the preview of a C# 3 book by Bruce Eckel and Jamie King. I’ve downloaded it, and had a look – naturally interested in the competition (and with plenty of evidence that I’ve already finished my book and won’t be plagiarising!). At the same time, I’m also interested in some other C# books which are coming out or are already out – particularly Head First C#. My question is – would my views on … Continue reading Reviewing other C# books?

Reading Geek Night 2 – March 28th

By jonskeet

I’ve mentioned “Reading Geek Night” before – it’s basically a loosely connected bunch of folks talking about fun stuff. There’s a mix of agile/not, .NET/not, expert/not, egomaniac/not, sane/not etc. The next meeting will be on March 28th, at my house (unless this post draws vast numbers of new folks!). We’ll start off by talking about C#, with me basically doing a demo of chapter 1 of my book – evolving code from C# 1 to C# 3 via C# 2. From there I expect it’s likely we’ll look at LINQ in more depth, maybe iterators, maybe think up funky new … Continue reading Reading Geek Night 2 – March 28th

C# 4, part 5: Other bits and bobs which probably don’t merit inclusion

By jonskeet

Okay, I know I said that part 4 would be the last part in this series… but since then I’ve not only thought about iterator block parameter checking, but a few other things. Some of these I simply forgot about before, and some I hadn’t thought of yet. I’m not sure any of these are actually worthy of inclusion, but they may provoke further thought. Tuple returns I’ve been reading Programming Erlang and I suspect that being able to return tuples (i.e. multiple values, strongly typed but without an overall predefined type) would be a good thing. For instance, in … Continue reading C# 4, part 5: Other bits and bobs which probably don’t merit inclusion

The value of a language specification

By jonskeet

Last Friday evening was the inaugural Reading Geek Night. More about that another time, but if you’re in or around Reading in the UK, and fancy meeting up with some smart people (and me) to discuss software in various shapes and forms, let me know. After most people had gone home, a few of us including Stuart Caborn were talking about specs. Stuart remembers how I ended up writing some annotations in the C# Annotated Standard: we were debugging some code, and I noticed an unboxing conversion which was unboxing an enum as an int. It worked, but I was … Continue reading The value of a language specification