Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on my previous post Parallel Programming in .NET Framework 4: Getting Started . As promised, I am continuing the series. This time, let’s go a little bit deeper and talk about task schedulers , synchronization...

With this post I want to start a series devoted to the new parallel programming features in .NET Framework 4 and introduce you the Task Parallel Library (TPL) . Update. The list of posts in this series: Getting Started (this post) Task Schedulers and...

After a quick review of C# language features , let’s do the same for the IDE improvements. So, what’s in there for C# developers? Generate From Usage This feature greatly improves Visual Studio support for test-driven development (TDD) . However...

Visual Studio 2010 is here! And of course this means that C# 4.0 is also here. Let’s do a quick review of the new language features added in this release. Dynamic The dynamic keyword is a key feature of this release. It closes the gap between dynamic...

Crystal Reports has been a part of Visual Basic since 1993, and a part of Visual Studio since its first release in 2002. Crystal Reports has been a very successful component of these products. With the release of Visual Studio 2010, SAP and Microsoft...

This is a follow-up to the Getting Information About Objects, Types, and Members with Expression Trees post, so I would recommend that you read that one first. Among other code examples in that blog post, I demonstrated how you can get a property name...

In this post I’ll try to answer the most common questions I find on forums and in documentation feedback about C# covariance and contravariance. It’s a big topic for a single blog post, so expect to see a lot of “more information” links. Special thanks...

Let’s take a quick look at the object keyword first. I’m not going to talk a lot about it because it’s been around since C# 1.0. This keyword is nothing more than a shortcut for System.Object , which is the root type in the C# class hierarchy. (However...

Starting with C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008, you can use expression trees to get information about objects, types, and members. In this post I’m going to show some examples and explain what benefits you can get by using this technique. If you are not...

First of all, let’s take a look at the example from one of my previous posts . It creates an expression tree for calculating the factorial of a number. ParameterExpression value = Expression .Parameter( typeof ( int ), "value" ); ParameterExpression...

In the previous post I showed how you can use the new dynamic feature and the ExpandoObject class to add and remove properties at run time, and how this can make your code more readable and flexible than code written with LINQ to XML syntax. But there...

You have probably already heard about the new dynamic feature in C# 4.0 and how it is used to support COM interop. If you haven't, I strongly recommend reading the following MSDN articles: Using Type dynamic and How to: Access Office Interop Objects by...

Expression trees first appeared in Visual Studio 2008, where they were mainly used by LINQ providers. You can use expression trees to represent code in a tree-like format, where each node is an expression. You can also convert expression trees into compiled...

LINQ provides a convenient syntax and many useful methods for operating with collections of objects. However, to be correctly processed by LINQ comparison methods such as Distinct or Intersect , a type must satisfy certain requirements. Let’s take...

Let’s start with the basics and maybe repeat some information that many of you already know. One of the most important concepts in LINQ performance and optimization is, of course, deferred execution. It simply means that when you declare a variable and...

Visual Studio offers tons of useful debugging features and allows you to step through your code line-by-line. However, there are times when you don’t want to step through your application, but want to make it output simple text strings with variable values...

It is a common practice to store passwords in databases using a hash. MD5 (defined in RFC 1321 ) is a common hash algorithm, and using it from C# is easy. Here’s an implementation of a method that converts a string to an MD5 hash, which is a 32-character...

Sometimes, you might want to make your application a bit more audible. If you are using .NET 2.0, you can utilize the new System.Media namespace and its SystemSound and SystemSounds classes. The SystemSounds class contains five static properties that...

Often, you need a way to monitor your applications once they are running on the server or even at the customer site -- away from your Visual Studio debugger. In those situations, it is often helpful to have a simple routine that you can use to log messages...

When you have struct objects as the key in a hashtable, the lookup operation of the hashtable performs miserably. This can be attributes to the GetHashCode() function which is used internally to do the lookup. If a struct contains only simple value...

tipu_77 asked "What are microsoft suggested naming conventions in C#?" The .NET Framework Team collects their recommendations at their GotDotNet community site . which points to a fairly comprehensive MSDN page Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers...

All the /target: options except module create .NET assemblies. Depending on the option, the compiler adds metadata for the operating system to use when loading the portable executable (PE) file and for the runtime to use in executing the contained assembly...

The difference is that the value of a static readonly field is set at run time, and can thus be modified by the containing class, w hereas the value of a const field is set to a compile time constant. In the static readonly case, the containing class...

Strictly speaking you can't, since const can only be applied to a field or local whose value is known at compile time. In both the lines below, the right-hand is not a constant expression (not in C#). const int [] constIntArray = newint [] {2...

Use the System.Environment class. Specifically the GetEnvironmentVariable and SetEnvironmentVariable methods. Admitedly, this is not a question specific to C#, but it is one I have seen enough C# programmers ask, and the ability to set environment variables...