Design

Casting vs "as" – embracing exceptions

By jonskeet

(I’ve ended up commenting on this issue on Stack Overflow quite a few times, so I figured it would be worth writing a blog post to refer to in the future.) There are lots of ways of converting values from one type to another – either changing the compile-time type but actually keeping the value the same, or actually changing the value (for example converting int to double). This post will not go into all of those – it would be enormous – just two of them, in one specific situation. The situation we’re interested in here is where you … Continue reading Casting vs "as" – embracing exceptions

Array covariance: not just ugly, but slow too

By jonskeet

It seems to be quite a long time since I’ve written a genuine "code" blog post. Time to fix that. This material may well be covered elsewhere – it’s certainly not terrifically original, and I’ve been meaning to post about it for a long time. In particular, I remember mentioning it at CodeMash in 2012. Anyway, the time has now come. Refresher on array covariance Just as a bit of background before we delve into the performance aspect, let me remind you what array covariance is, and when it applies. The basic idea is that C# allows a reference conversion … Continue reading Array covariance: not just ugly, but slow too

The perils of conditional mutability

By jonskeet

This morning I was wrestling with trying to make some Noda Time unit tests faster. For some reason, the continuous integration host we’re using is really slow at loading resources under .NET 4. The unit tests which run in 10 seconds on my home laptop take over three hours on the continuous integration system. Taking stack traces at regular intervals showed the problem was with the NodaFormatInfo constructor, which reads some resources. I may look into streamlining the resource access later, but before we get to that point, I wanted to try to reduce the number of times we call … Continue reading The perils of conditional mutability

Subtleties in API design – member placement

By jonskeet

Noda Time is nearing v1.0, which means I’m spending more time writing documentation than code. It also means reviewing the APIs we’ve got with a critical eye – whether that’s removing extraneous members, adding useful ones, or moving things around. (In particular, writing documentation often suggests where a change would make calling code read more naturally.) This post is about one particular section of the API, and the choices available. Although I do go into some detail around the specific calls involved, that’s just for context… the underlying choices are ones which could be faced when designing any API. I’ve … Continue reading Subtleties in API design – member placement