Here’s a crazy-seeming but honest-to-goodness real customer scenario that got reported to me recently. There are three DLLs involved, Alpha.DLL, Bravo.DLL and Charlie.DLL. The classes in each are: public class Alpha // In Alpha.DLL { public virtual void...

When you override a virtual method in C# you are required to ensure that the stated accessibility of the overridden method - that is, whether it is public, internal, protected or protected internal(*) – is exactly re-stated in the overriding method. Except...

Suppose you’ve got a huge mixed-up pile of white, black, green and red socks, with roughly equal numbers of each. You randomly choose two of them. What is the probability that they are a matched pair? There are sixteen ways of choosing a pair of socks...

(This is part four of a four part series; part three is here .) Part Four: Making the problem worse I said earlier that the fundamental reason for namespaces in the first place was organization of types into a hierarchy, not separation of two things with...

(This is part three of a four part series; part two is here , part four is here .) Part Three: Bad hierarchical design The reason we humans invented hierarchies in the first place is to organize a complicated body of stuff such that there’s a well-defined...

(This is part two of a four part series; part one is here , part three is here .) Part Two: Machine-generated code: You write namespace Foo { public sealed class Foo { public string Blah(int x) { … } } } You take this code and run a third-party “decorator...

(This is part one of a four part series; part two is here .) The Framework Design Guidelines say in section 3.4 “do not use the same name for a namespace and a type in that namespace”. (*) That is: namespace MyContainers.List { public class List { … ...

Thanks for all your insights on what is attractive or unattractive about job postings, and about working on developer tools. A great many of the comments were strongly aligned with each other; no one likes “alphabet soup”. And a number of them illustrated...

A recent user question: I have code that maintains a queue of pending work items waiting to be completed on various different worker threads. In certain unfortunate fatal error situations I complete each of these by throwing an exception. Can I...

Today I want your insights, opinions and advice. In any large organization over time people are going to move around within that organization, or leave it for various reasons, and therefore sometimes you need to bring in fresh new people to fill the...