Back in November I wrote a bit about a corner case in method type inference which does not work as expected or as specified in C# 3.0. A number of people made blog comments, sent me mail, and entered "Connect" issues with additional problems and ideas...

Raymond has written about this , I have written about Raymond writing about it , but I still frequently get questions from people who are unclear on the difference between precedence, associativity and evaluation order. I suspect that this confusion...

Here's some back-and-forth from an email conversation I had with a user a while back. Why should one avoid method hiding? If there were no advantages and only disadvantages then we would not have added it to the language in the first place. C# implements...

Here's a question I get fairly frequently: the user desires to create a generic type Bar<T> constrained such that T is guaranteed to be a Foo<U> , for some U . The way they usually try to write this is class Bar<T> where T : Foo<T>...

In my youth I once attended a lecture given by Brian Kernighan on the subject of code quality, which was very influential on my attitudes towards writing legible code. One of the things that Kernighan recommended was to endeavour write code that was so...

Consider this program which attempts to mutate a readonly mutable struct. What happens? struct Mutable { private int x; public int Mutate() { this.x = this.x + 1; return this.x; } } class Test { public readonly Mutable m = new Mutable(); static...

OK, computers aren't entirely dumb when it comes to LINQ. Here's an example of a place where we're a bit smarter. Consider the following query: IEnumerable<int> query = from n in number_array orderby n select n; Does this get transformed...

A few short takes today, from questions I've received recently about LINQ in C# 3.0. The first question was " in the following code, does it really check every single non-negative integer, or does it use the knowledge that once you're beyond ten, you...

UPDATE: Andrew Kennedy, author of the paper I reference below, was good enough to point out some corrections and omissions, which I have addressed. Thanks Andrew! As I've discussed at length in this space, we are considering adding covariance and contravariance...

I asked a second follow-up question back in Part Two: Suppose you wanted to make this hierarchy an immutable collection, where "Add" and "Remove" returned new collections rather than mutating the existing collection. How would you represent the parenting...

In Part Two I asked a couple of follow-up questions, the first of which was: Suppose you were a hostile third party and you wanted to mess up the parenting invariant. Clearly, if you are sufficiently trusted, you can always use private reflection or unsafe...