Visual Studio 2012 Intellisense Not Working - SOLVED
Posted on Nov 20, 2012
| 302 words
So, this post is about our beloved IDE instead of actual code.
I recently upgraded my home PC from Visual Studio 2010 and 11 Beta to Visual Studio 2012. The very first thing I noticed was that after about 10 minutes of programming my Intellisense quit working and never came back. I thought to myself “what the hell Visual Studio? 2010 didn’t have these problems?!” and then, after a swig of beer, proceeded to exercise my Google-Fu to solve this issue.
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Static vs Instance string.Equals Benchmark
Posted on Oct 24, 2012
| 184 words
A friend of mine commented on my last post asking about how much faster the static string.Equals method is than the instance string.Equals method. To satiate both of our curiosities, I have created this benchmarking application:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
string a = "hello";
string b = "hi";
stopwatch.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; i++)
{
a.Equals(b);
}
stopwatch.Stop();
Console.WriteLine("Instance string.Equals over 10,000,000 iterations: " + stopwatch.
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Static vs Instance string.Equals
Posted on Oct 22, 2012
| 196 words
As you may or may not know, static methods are usually faster than instance methods. This alone should be a good enough reason to use the static string.Equals method in .NET, but if that doesn’t do it for you, allow me to present a simple example.
string a = "hello";
string b = "hi";
bool result = a.Equals(b);
What is the expected result of these lines? A boolean value of false, of course.
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The Joel Test Really is Meaningful
Posted on Oct 14, 2012
| 717 words
Well, it’s been nearly 2 months since my last post… I’m learning that if you want a blog to be successful, you have to carve time out of your busy life and make it happen. So, with renewed focus, I re-enter the fray.
The Joel Test is a curious and honest thing. It has been around since the year 2000 and was invented by a guy named Joel Spolsky, as the name might imply.
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Published by MDSN UK Blog
Posted on Aug 26, 2012
| 35 words
This isn’t a very technical post, but I was published by Microsoft recently via their MSDN UK Blog! The article is on creating and maintaining a successful User Group.
Click here to read the article!
TPL and Error Handling & Continuation Tasks
Posted on Aug 12, 2012
| 261 words
Two of my colleagues (one from work and one from a user group) kindly pointed out to me that in my last post I omitted Continuation Tasks as a means of Error Handling for the TPL. As such, I will expand upon my last post with an example of handling errors via a Continuation Task.
Continuing where we left off last, the following code will utilize a Task Continuation to handle errors within Tasks.
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TPL and Error Handling
Posted on Aug 5, 2012
| 1019 words
As of .NET 4.0, the TPL or Task Parallel Library is king when it comes to parallelization. It allows for smooth, easy multi-threading for any application. There is a slight learning curve, however, and a major part of this is understanding how Exceptions bubble-up while using the TPL.
Let’s partake in a simple example. This code will create and run a task that throws an Exception, and then attempt to catch it:
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Compiler Tricks - Inferred Types
Posted on Jul 16, 2012
| 282 words
The .NET compiler is a terrific thing… After all, it turns your C# into an executable program!
One nice feature of the .NET compiler, which is becoming better each release, is inferred typing. I’d like to lay out a few short examples that might help you develop your programming standards and practices.
Inferring a type when creating an array.
// Create and initialize an array
var myArray = new int[] { 1, 2, 3 };
Becomes:
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Custom Output Caching with MVC3 and .NET 4.0 - Done Properly!
Posted on Jun 20, 2012
| 1231 words
I came across a need at work today to re-implement some of the Output Caching for our MVC3 application which runs under .NET 4.0. I wanted to use standard Output Caching (via the OutputCacheAttribute class, why re-invent the well-working wheel?) but due to some of our requirements I needed more control over how my objects were cached. More specifically, I needed to cache them with a custom Cache Dependency. With a little bit of Google-Fu, I was delighted to learn of the Output Cache Provider functionality introduced in ASP.
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LINQ and Deferred Execution
Posted on Jun 11, 2012
| 690 words
As of .NET 3.0, LINQ (and the often related Lambda Expressions) have been available for our use and abuse. LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query, and is a method of modelling OO data in a more or less relational sense that is not unlike databases. And just like databases, it comes with a cost.
To offset this cost, LINQ uses Deferred Execution. Deferred Execution means that the code is not executed until it is needed.
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