Last time we established that an "atomic" read or write of a variable means that in multithreaded scenarios, you never end up with "halfway mutated" values in the variable. The variable goes from unmutated to mutated directly, with no intervening state...

I get a fair number of questions about atomicity, volatility, thread safety, immutability and the like; the questions illustrate a lot of confusion on these topics. Let's take a step back and examine each of these ideas to see what the differences are...

Here's a common problem that we face in the compiler realm all the time: you want to make an efficient immutable lookup table for mapping names to "symbols". This is in a sense the primary problem that the compiler has to solve; someone says "x = y +...

(This is the fourth and final part of a series on the corner cases of optional arguments in C# 4; part three is here .) Last time we discussed how some people think that an optional argument generates a bunch of overloads that call each other. People...

(This is part three of a series on the corner cases of optional arguments in C# 4; part two is here . Part four is here .) A lot of people seem to think that this: void M(string x, bool y = false) { ... whatever ... } is actually a syntactic sugar for...

(This is part two of a series on the corner cases of optional arguments in C# 4. Part one is here . Part three is here . This portion of the series was inspired by this StackOverflow question .) Last time we saw that the declared optional arguments of...

(This is part one of a series on the corner cases of optional arguments in C# 4. Part two is here .) In C# 4.0 we added "optional arguments"; that is, you can state in the declaration of a method's parameter that if certain arguments are omitted, then...