C# 4

A couple of days ago I accidentally derailed the comments on Eric Lippert’s blog post about unused "using" directives. The reason that redundant code doesn’t generate a warning in Visual Studio is that it’s what you get to start with in Visual Studio. This led me to rant somewhat about other aspects of Visual Studio’s behaviour which sacrifice long term goodness in favour of short term efficiency. Almost all the subsequent comments (at the time of writing this post) are concerned with my rant rather than Eric’s post. Some agree with me, some don’t – but it’s only now that … Continue reading The irritation of bad names

This morning, while checking out an email I’d received about my brain-teasers page, I discovered an interesting change to the CLR in .NET 4.0. At least, I think it’s interesting. It’s possible that different builds of the CLR have exhibited different behaviour for a while – I only have 32-bit versions of Windows installed, so that’s what I’m looking at for this whole post. (Oh, and all testing was done under .NET 4.0b2 – it could still change before release.) Note: to try any of this code, build in release mode. Running in the debugger or even running a debug … Continue reading Type initialization changes in .NET 4.0

At a glance, this code doesn’t look particularly evil. What does it do though? Compile it with the C# 4.0b1 compiler and run it… using System; class Base {     public virtual void Foo(int x, int y)     {         Console.WriteLine("Base: x={0}, y={1}", x, y);     } } class Derived : Base {     public override void Foo(int y, int x)     {         Console.WriteLine("Derived: x={0}, y={1}", x, y);     } } class PureEvil {     static void Main()     {         Derived d = new Derived();         Base b = d;                  b.Foo(x: 10, y: 20);         d.Foo(x: 10, y: 20);     } … Continue reading Evil code of the day