(This is part two of a two-part series on the dangers of aborting a thread. Part one is here .) Suppose you’re shutting down the worker thread we were talking about last time, and it throws an exception? What happens? Badness, that’s...

(This is part one of a two-part series on the dangers of aborting a thread. Part two is here .) The other day, six years ago, I was was talking a bit about how to decide whether to keep waiting for a bus , or to give up and walk. It led to a quite...

The conditional operator ( condition ? consequence : alternative ) is often referred to as both the “ternary operator” and the “tertiary operator”. What’s the difference? “ Ternary ” means “ having three parts ”. Operators in C# can be unary, binary...

I was browsing the archive of design notes from the early days of the C# language the other day. Apparently whoever was editing the notes back then had a sense of humour. (UPDATE: It was Scott, just as I suspected .) I stumbled across this note from May...

UPDATE: I interrupt this episode of FAIC with a request from my friend and colleague Lucian, from the VB team, who wonders whether it is common in C# to take advantage of the fact that assignment expressions are expressions. The most common usage of this...

As I mentioned a while back, there are some bugs in the compiler code which analyzes whether a set of classes violates the “no cycles” rules for base classes. (That is, a class is not allowed to inherit from itself, directly or indirectly, and not allowed...

Large bodies of code written in the C/C++ languages typically divide up the code into “header” files, which are just declarations of methods and types (and definitions of macros). The actual bodies of those methods and types are in completely different...

Which is better style? bool abc; if (Foo()) abc = Bar(); else abc = false; vs bool abc = Foo() && Bar(); ? To me, this comes down to the question “is Bar useful solely for obtaining its value, or also for its side effects?” The...