jaredpar's WebLog

I just released version 0.5.0 of VsVim: a vim emulation editor extension for Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 written in F#. This is a hobby project I’ve been working on for awhile now. I expect to continue updating this release as time goes on as I use it on...

As the owner of the VB.Net portion of the overall debugging experience, I frequently hear the request from customers to add LINQ support into the Watch / Immediate and Locals window. Virtually every other type of expression is available in the debugger...

Psychic classes have the appearance of ignoring data provided to it in an attempt to provide you with an answer they predict is better for the situation.   It’s impossible to look at a the data provided to an instance of the class and understand...

I was playing around in the registry the other day and found the PowerShell API lacking in a key area.  There does not appear to be a good way to detect the presence of a Registry Name/Value pair.  All of the operations such as New, Delete,...

Today Microsoft announced a new search engine called bing .  I’ve been dogfooding this engine internally for some time now and from my experience it’s a step up from the previous engine in both functionality and appearance.  It’s definitely...

When using an API you must take care to understand not only what it returns, but also for how long the data returned will be valid.  This is very important to consider because programs must make either be making decisions on valid and predictable...

People love to chat about how to conduct a C++ interview on newsgroups .  Eventually these topics will shift into a discussion about what questions a candidate must know in order for them to get a hire from a particular interview.  Unfortunately...

One argument I commonly hear against immutable collections is they are slow.  I’ve held the opposite belief for some time but shamefully had yet to look at actual numbers on the CLR.  Tonight I decided to change that by benchmarking one of my...

I’ve recently run across several APIs that have a dependency on only dealing with objects that are serializable (in the binary sense).  Unfortunately determining if an object is serializable is a non-trivial task and rife with problems.  These...

Recently I ran into a situation on a personal project where I needed a hashtable like structure for a set of WeakReference values.  When poking around for an existing implementation I saw found several versions which were very thin, type safe wrapper...

In my last post we discussed the problems with designing a safer API for mutable thread safe collections that employ only an internal locking system. The result was an API that was more difficult to mess up, yet pretty much unusable. Lets take a look...

Writing a collection which is mutable, thread safe and usable is an extremely difficult process. At least that’s what you’ve likely been told all through your schooling. But then you get out on the web and see a multitude of thread safe lists, maps and...

Previously I blogged about PowerShell’s lack of closure support within a script block.  This presents a significant hurdle in developing a LINQ like DSL for powershell which I’ve been working on.  Imagine the following syntax $a = from it in...

I published a .Net utility library on Code Gallery today called BclExtras .  It’s a set of classes meant to be used in addition to the standard .Net base class libraries (BCL).  The main focuses of the library are functional programming, multi...

The Take pair of functions are very similar to the Skip functions .  The Take expression does essentially the opposite of the Skip functions.  Skip is useful for getting elements further down the pipeline.  Take is used for getting elements...

CLR 2.0 introduced IEquatable<T> which is an interface that allows for type safe equality comparisons.  Previously, the best available method for comparing equality was the virtual Object Equals method.  The method is loosely typed since...

Next up in the PowerShell LINQ series is SkipWhile .  This LINQ function takes an enumerable instance and a predicate.  The function will skip the elements in the enumerable while the predicate is true.  The argument to the predicate is...

The PowerShell pipeline, is fairly similar to C#/VB’s LINQ.  Both filter a group of elements through a series of transformations which produce a new series of elements.  The devil is in the details of course but I’ll get to that in a future...

Most people discover I’m a Dvorak user because they’re in my office, attempt to drive during a conversation and find they are typing gibberish. I take the keyboard, hit CTRL+LEFT_SHIFT and they’re on their way again. Well at least until they open up a...

I broke down a few weeks ago and joined Twitter .  If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s a lot like sitting in a room with a bunch of people and thinking out loud.  Only, it’s done in IM form.  It’s interesting and I find myself musing...

Script blocks are a concise way of representing an expression or statement group in Powershell.  It’s the C#/F#/VB lambda equivalent for PowerShell.  One difference between C#/F#/VB lambda expressions and a scriptblock is the lack of lexical...

Script blocks are a powershell construct for storing an expression or group of statements inside an expression.  It’s the equivalent of a C#/F#/VB Lamba expression.  Recently I needed to use a script block but found I had forgotten how to read...

Just had a random thought while I was looking at some code today.  It’s yet another argument in the case sensitive vs. case insensitive language battle.  Do you really want this to be able to compile? class C1 { int M1; int m1; } Yes...

With all of the great built-in commands for processing pipelines the absence of a good command to count the number of elements in a pipeline seems to stand out.  The best built-in way to count the number of objects in a pipeline is to convert the...

In responding to a recent blog post , one of the readers, Jeremy Gray, noted that I was using a NotImplementedException where I should have been using a NotSupportedException .  At first I did not agree.  There was a method on an interface which...