Month: November 2008

The Snippy Reflector add-in

By jonskeet

Those of you who’ve read C# in Depth will know about Snippy – a little tool which makes it easy to build complete programs from small snippets of code. I’m delighted to say that reader Jason Haley has taken the source code for Snippy and built an add-in for Reflector. This will make it much simpler to answer questions like this one about struct initialization, where you really want to the IL generated for a snippet. Here’s a screenshot to show what it does: This is really cool – if you want to dabble to see what the C# compiler … Continue reading The Snippy Reflector add-in

Copenhagen C# talk videos now up

By jonskeet

The videos from my one day talk about C# in Copenhagen are now on the MSDN community site. There are eight sessions, varying between about 25 minutes and 50 minutes in length. I haven’t had time to watch them yet, but when I do I’ll submit brief summaries so you can quickly get to the bits you’re most interested in. (As far as I’m aware, they’re only available via Silverlight, which I realise isn’t going to be convenient for everyone.) Feedback is very welcome.

November 19th: London .NET User Group, Push LINQ!

By jonskeet

On November 19th, I’ll be speaking at the London .NET User Group about Push LINQ. I was quite pleasantly surprised by being able to explain it to some extent in Copenhagen, and this evening will be entirely about Push LINQ, so I’ll be able to go into a lot more detail. Skills Matter will be hosting the event (near Farringdon station). It starts at 6.30pm, and registration is now open. Should be fun. Please come and heckle.

How much do you care about blog tags?

By jonskeet

Occasionally I feel that my collection of tags is somewhat lacking. For instance, I’ve been thinking of adding “language design” and “public speaking” tags – and then going through previous posts and retagging where appropriate. However, I’d rather not do this if no-one actually uses tags in the first place. I know that I find the tags on Eric Lippert’s blog incredibly handy when I’m going back to look for a particular article, but I suspect that’s mostly because Eric’s blog is so quotable in the first place. Would it help any of you for me to be more comprehensive … Continue reading How much do you care about blog tags?

Jaffa bugs

By jonskeet

Currently I’m working on a problem found by one of our testers. Unfortunately, it’s hard to reproduce. Inspired by the fact that yesterday our micro-kitchen had jaffa cakes in, I propose that if we’re going to be frustrated by bugs like this, we might as well at least mock them. I propose that we call them jaffa bugs, and will work hard to promote this jargon until it takes over the world. Insert evil laugh here. (Just in case the etymology here isn’t clear, see the Wikipedia “Only Fools and Horses” entry.)

.NET 4.0’s game-changing feature? Maybe contracts…

By jonskeet

Update: As Chris Nahr pointed out, there’s a blog post by Melitta Andersen of the BCL team explaining this in more detail. Obviously I’ve been looking at the proposed C# 4.0 features pretty carefully, and I promise I’ll blog more about them at some later date – but yesterday I watched a PDC video which blew me away. As ever, a new version of .NET means more than just language changes – Justin van Patten has written an excellent blog post about what to expect in the core of thee framework. There are nice things in there – tuples and … Continue reading .NET 4.0’s game-changing feature? Maybe contracts…