I wish all the questions I got were this straightforward: “I need to compare two strings for non-culture-sensitive equality. I notice that there are methods String.Equals and String.Compare which can both do that. What is the guideline on which...

Here’s an almost useless but thoroughly delightful five-dollar word. English of course is read left-to-right. Hebrew and Arabic are read right-to-left. A text is boustrophedonic if it reads left-to-right and right-to-left, alternating . It’s from the...

Jeff Atwood was kind enough to once more give me the shout-out in his blog the other day . Thanks Jeff! This inspires me to continue my series on five-dollar words for programmers. Here’s one that I only learned relatively recently, when I helped write...

Interviewing job-seeking candidates is probably the most impactful thing that I do at Microsoft as far as our business is concerned. Sure, the day-to-day work of implementing the compiler is of course what I am specifically there to do. But ultimately...

(Note: not to be confused with Inheritance and Representation .) I get a fair number of questions about the C# cast operator. The most frequent question I get is: short sss = 123; object ooo = sss; // Box the short. int iii = (int) sss; // Perfectly...

Here's an interesting question I got the other day: We are writing code to translate old mainframe business report generation code written in a BASIC-like language to C#. The original language allows "goto" branching from outside of a loop to the...

I am pleased to announce that my co-author Eric Carter has made significant updates to our VSTO book . (Though I notice with chagrin that one of the changes is that the title is much shorter than it ought to be .) It is not yet available in bookstores...

A couple years ago I wrote a bit about how our codegen for the lock statement could sometimes lead to situations in which an unoptimized build had different potential deadlocks than an optimized build of the same source code. This is unfortunate, so we...

(Technology of a different sort today, just for a change of pace.) The first time I saw a picture of the Falkirk Wheel -- the world's only rotating boat lift, in Scotland -- I thought that it must be a really nice computer-generated landscape. It looks...