I’m the first to agree that concurrency is a hard problem to solve. I have bad memories involving C, POSIX threads and mutexes that I’d rather just forget. In the end, dealing with threads sucks, we’re all just waiting for the abstraction, right? There has been some positive progress in .NET land ... [More]

I was thinking to myself the other day, "you know, I haven't written any socket code in years". A few weeks before I'd been thinking the same thing about threads. It's probably a good thing that I haven't, sockets and threads can get complicated and there are now powerful libraries built o... [More]

It’s not long after swallowing the unit testing pill that your appreciation for the colour green starts to increase. It soon reaches the point where you want a pretty little green light for every method. However, when you set out to test as much as you can you quickly run into some awkward issues. ... [More]

Back in high school, I remember writing the second version of my IDE program. This was the beginning of 2004 and I had very little experience of writing any sizable piece of software. IDE2 would allow multiple users to connect to a central server where they could work together on code. It would als... [More]

Source control is really important. Without source control, we would be working with single revisions of code where older changes are lost as soon as newer changes are made. Without source control, you couldn’t simply go back in time to before you attempted to implement your own version of a divide... [More]

I’m currently sat here at Barcamp Blackpool and so far it has been an awesome event. There have been a number of interesting sessions varying from a custom made hardware device for playing an organ to an overview of using Amazon EC2 for hosting .NET code on Mono. My talk about code injection ... [More]

C# is a statically typed language. This means that types are checked at compile time rather than at runtime. However, in C# 4.0, the dynamic keyword will be introduced. That’s right, we will be statically typing something to be a dynamic type. The dynamic keyword essentially tells the C# compiler t... [More]

Extensibility is important. Face it, unless you are able to easily extend the functionality of your application, you are going to be missing out on a big competitive advantage. If your application is easily extensible, you will be able to build new features and respond to competition more quickly. F... [More]

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come across full-fledged systems that were created 10 years ago when classic ASP was acceptable commonplace. Back then of course, classic ASP was cool. The shift from static HTML to dynamically generated content was a compelling one, and to be fair it has serv... [More]