I’ve been working alot with web services lately, querying for information and recordsets, applying business logics and then finally displaying it all on a web page. A problem that I need to deal with (it feels like) all the time is empty responses from the service layer.

Sometime the response is null, sometimes not. Sometimes inner collections of a response are empty, null… anyway, it end up with alot of theese:

if (products != null)
{
    foreach (Product product in products)
    {
        // do something with product
    }
}

Doing these if-nulls over and over again made me realize that I needed an NeverNullEnum wrapper, Read the rest of this entry »

Some time back I had an experience down at a local supermarket, a strange experience that reminded me of a neglected topic in software development. The topic of efficient multi-threading.

Everybody knows multi-threading as a difficult thing. Multi-threaded applications are inherently difficult to develop, debug and maintain and has potentially evil pitfalls in form of race-conditions and deadlocks and what not. You need your thoughts clear and your tongue straight and remember to put locks, monitors and synchronization objects all over your code… but in the end it will make your application run at leaping speeds while utilizing the smallest of transistors in your top-notch multi-core CPU. Read the rest of this entry »

There are times when you want your class to expose some kind of collection. Maybe you got a Server class and want to world to access it connections, or you got a Family class and want to provide access to the collection of family members. Sometimes that is easy - just to return a reference to the collection from a function or property. Other times it’s not that easy.
Read the rest of this entry »

I once worked together with this developer that seems to enjoy (or had a rather bad habbit of) turning every logic expression into its negative complement. That is, instead of properties (or fields) named Enabled or Visible, his properties would be named Disabled or Hidden. It made every expression look like:

If Not Disabled And Not Hidden Then       

    'enabled and visible       

End If

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a litt story of how things shouldn’t be (first posted at Codeguru).

I was once asked to fix this totally non-critical feature in a very critical application. The argument was “we really don’t need it, but since it’s documented you may as well make it work”.
Read the rest of this entry »

This one is just too good to go unnoticed.

http://redsolo.blogspot.com/2007/01/continued-inconsistencies-in-net.html

Don’t let them trick you! MSDNs description of the IIF function is not correct. Read the rest of this entry »

[I'm no VB enthusiast, so pardon me if this post is a bit biased.]

When I started out programming, a long time ago, the motivation was utter control. I wanted to master the computer, see how far I could get and how much I could get a away with. It was all about circumventing any obstacle in my path. I’ve done a lot of bad things. Some on purpose, some by pure ignorance, some on pure luck. And usually I learn something from it (moral, ugh). Read the rest of this entry »

I was working on this extremly bleeding edge .NET application with some hightech (stolen) javascript code, when I figured I needed a way to obfuscate the client side scripts. I searched the web twice, but all I came up with was a couple of advanced desktop applications that could do the trick… but that was not what I wanted… Read the rest of this entry »

Yariv Hammer has a great post on how to generalize delegates by using Generics. And, since he kindly mentions me in that post I just had to put up a link.