I was recently contacted about a cool way of possibly getting a free .NET ebook (legally!) or if you’re really lucky, the complete Manning .NET library. Basically click on the advert below to enter: one person will be drawn each day until July 17th, and the final prize will be the complete .NET library from Manning. Have at it. If it happens to draw more attention to C# in Depth at the same time, that’s fine by me…
Apologies for the recent blog outage. The msmvps.com server had some issues, and has been updated with recent patches etc at the same time. There’s one downside with this – my blog URL included "jon.skeet" and the server now doesn’t like blog names with dots in, so links to old articles are likely to be broken I’m afraid. Susan Bradley has been wonderful at looking at this issue for me – many thanks to her – and we’ll see if we can end up with a slightly more useful solution. (Susan has already redirected http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon.skeet to http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet which should help … Continue reading Blog update
This morning I happened to show a colleague (Malcolm Rowe) the neat trick of using nullable types and the null-coalescing operator (??) to implement compound comparisons in C#. He asked whether it wouldn’t have been nicer to make this a library feature rather than a language feature. I’m all for putting features into libraries where possible, but there’s a problem in this case: the ?? operator doesn’t evaluate its right operand unless the left operand evaluates to null. This can’t be replicated in a library. Or can it? The obvious way to lazily evaluate an expression is to turn it … Continue reading Automatic lambda expressions
Unless you’ve listened to I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, the BBC Radio 4 “antidote to panel games” which was chaired by the recently departed (and much missed) Humphrey Lyttelton, this post may not make a lot of sense to you. That’s not intended to guarantee that it’ll make any sense to you even if you have listened to it, mind you. ISIHAC was full of very silly improvisation games. I was listening to an episode last night, and thought a developer version could be equally silly. Games played might include the following: (links show the Wikipedia description of the … Continue reading I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Cluestick
Joe Albahari, co-author of the excellent C# 3.0 in a Nutshell (previously reviewed here) kindly agreed to review C# in Depth. Not only has he provided the review below, but he also supplied several pages of notes made while he was reading it. Many of those notes have been incorporated into the C# in Depth notes page – it’s always good to include thoughtful feedback. (And I always welcome more, hint hint.) Without further ado, here’s Joe’s review. C# in Depth: Review After having been invited to review this book by two people at Manning—as well as Jon himself—I figure … Continue reading Guest post: Joe Albahari reviews C# in Depth
Either my timing is great or it’s lousy – you decide. Yesterday I posted about parallelising Conway’s Life – and today the new CTP for the Parallel Extensions library comes out! The bad news is that it meant I had to run all the tests again… the good news is that it means we can see whether or not the team’s work over the last 6 months has paid off. Breaking change The only breaking change I’ve seen is that AsParallel() no longer takes a ParallelQueryOptions parameter – instead, you call AsOrdered() on the value returned from AsParallel(). It was … Continue reading Parallel Extensions June CTP
Okay, so I’ve probably exhausted the Mandelbrot set as a source of interest, at least for the moment. However, every so often someone mentions something or other which sounds like a fun exercise in parallelisation. The latest one is Conway’s Game of Life. Like the Mandelbrot set, this is something I used to play with when I was a teenager – and like the Mandelbrot set, it’s an embarrassingly parallel problem. As before, I’ve written a few implementations but not worked excessively hard to optimise. All my tests were performed with a game board of 1000×500 cells, displaying at one … Continue reading More parallelisation fun: Conway’s Game of Life
