jaredpar's WebLog

Nothing revolutionary about that statement.  Yet I keep reading the opposite on various comment threads and message boards so I thought it a good idea to explore it again. Code is not self documenting. The "code is self document" argument...

I like Enums and use them frequently for options and behavior.  To an extent I use Enum's to control behavior.  For example enum Kind { Kind1, Kind2, Kind3 } class Example { private Kind m_kind; public int SomeAction() { switch...

Recently I got bit by void* again because of another C++ quirk I didn't think through.  I had a class which wrapped a void* which could be one of many different structs.  The structs were POD and didn't have any shared functionality hence I...

My blogging tool is Windows Live Writer and I use the "Insert From Visual Studio" plug-in to get pretty looking code into my postings.  The generated code uses the <pre> tag for formatting the elements.  Unfortunately my blog...

I'm happy to announce that the PInvoke Interop Assistant tool is now available on CodePlex.  This includes the binaries, source code and the dev authored unit tests.  It is hosted on the more general CLR Interop Tools page.  http://www...

Recently I've done a bit of posting about the difficulties of properly implementing equality in VB (and DotNet in general). While most of the problems can be fixed with a standard snippet the one really hard to implement issue is GetHashCode(). The rules...

I finished reading Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering a few weeks ago.  This is an excellent book and I recommend it for anyone who's been in the industry for a few years.  Typically I don't enjoy books of this type because I feel they...

One of the parts of a Tuple implementation for RantPack I struggled the most with was naming.  I tend to struggle with names quite a bit and there's really no reason for it.  It's a combination of pickiness and ... well there's really no good...

Finished reading The Pragmatic Programmer a few weeks ago.  I've been slacking off on the book review but better late than never.  This is a good book for people desiring to be a more pragmatic programmer.  At ~270 pages it's a quick read...

One operation I frequently perform is use a powershell pipeline to filter out a large set of data. Typically I don't care what is in the result but rather is there actually anything left in the pipeline. I can't find a good powershell built-in to perform...

Quick script you can run at login to ensure that your XP machine is being defragmented. I chose 1:00 AM every evening but you can quickly alter that in the script. I have this script run as part of my regular set of configuration scripts to ensure that...

I released a new version of RantPack today.  Mostly this is a bug fix release with a couple of minor new features. https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=RantPack&ReleaseId=1119 Features Added a way to shim Immutable...

I was reading Charlie's post on VS Color schemes and thought I would add my favorite to the list.  InkPot is a color setting for vim which I adapted to VS awhile back.  Very easy on the eyes.  You can download it here