Today, yet another episode in my ongoing series " What's the difference? " This time, a non-computer-related topic . I am often complimented on my choice of outerwear in the Seattle rainy season, and I hate to respond to a well-meant compliment with a correction. So I usually let all those "Nice trenchcoat...

Today, another episode of my ongoing series " What's the difference? " Today, what's the difference between a remainder and a modulus, and which, if either, does the % operator represent in C#? A powerful idea that you see come up in mathematics and computer programming over and over again is the...

Today, another dialogue, and another episode of my ongoing series "what's the difference?" What’s the difference, if any, between a “destructor” and a “finalizer”? Both are mechanisms for cleaning up a resource when it is no longer in use. When I was asked this, at first I didn’t think there was...

I've written a lot about this already, but I think one particular point bears repeating. As we're getting closer to shipping C# 4.0, I'm seeing a lot of documents, blogs, and so on, attempting to explain what "covariant" means. This is a tricky word to define in a way that is actually meaningful to...

Most people will tell you that the difference between " (Alpha) bravo " and " bravo as Alpha " is that the former throws an exception if the conversion fails, whereas the latter returns null. Though this is correct, and this is the most obvious difference, it's not the only difference. There are pitfalls...

Like "fixed" and "into", "partial" is also used in two confusingly similar-yet-different ways in C#. The purpose of a partial class is to allow you to textually break up a class declaration into multiple parts, usually parts found in separate files. The motivation for this feature was machine-generated...

User : Why does this program not compile correctly in the release build? class Program { #if DEBUG static int testCounter = 0; #endif static void Main(string[] args) { SomeTestMethod(testCounter++); } [Conditional("DEBUG")] static void SomeTestMethod(int t) { } } Eric : This fails to compile in...

The keyword "into" in a query comprehension means two different things, depending on whether it follows a join or select/group. If it follows a join, it turns a join into a group join. If it follows a select or group then it introduces a query continuation. These two features are quite different, but...

I got an email the other day that began: I have a question about fixed sized buffers in C#: unsafe struct FixedBuffer { public fixed int buffer[100]; } Now by declaring buffer as fixed it is not movable... And my heart sank. This is one of those deeply unfortunate times when subtle choices...

"Scope" has got to be one of the most confusing words in all of programming language design. People seem to use it casually to mean whatever is convenient at the time; I most often see it confused with lifetime and declaration space . As in "the memory will be released when the variable goes out of scope...

Because I'm a geek, I enjoy learning about the sometimes-subtle differences between easily-confused things. For example: I'm still not super-clear in my head on the differences between a hub , router and switch and how it relates to the gnomes that live inside of each. Hunks of minerals found...