June 2007 - Posts

• What exactly does 'lifted' mean?

  (Note: all type placeholders S , T , U that I mention in this article are non-nullable value types.) I got a question the other day from a reader who had been taking a close look at the C# 2.0 standard. He noticed that when we talk about nullables in Read More... Posted Wednesday, June 27, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Lippert | 4 Comments Filed under: Rarefied Heights, C#, Mathematics

• Inside or Outside?

  Here's a question I was asked recently which I got wrong. This is why I always encourage Microsofties to ask the entire C#/VB/whatever-interest-group their question, rather than directing it to me specifically. The question was which is "better"? (The Read More... Posted Monday, June 25, 2007 7:31 AM by Eric Lippert | 3 Comments Filed under: C#, Mistakes

• Calling static methods on type variables is illegal, part three

  There were lots of good comments on my previous entries in this series. I want to address some of them, but first I want to wrap this up by considering how a small change to the scenario makes it plausible to choose a different option. Consider now the Read More... Posted Thursday, June 21, 2007 9:37 AM by Eric Lippert | 8 Comments Filed under: C#, Static Methods

• Calling static methods on type variables is illegal, part two

  Last time I pointed out that static methods are always determined exactly at compile time, and used that fact to justify why static methods cannot be called on type parameter types. But aren’t the type arguments to generics actually determined at compile Read More... Posted Monday, June 18, 2007 7:14 AM by Eric Lippert | 11 Comments Filed under: C#, Static Methods

• Calling static methods on type variables is illegal, part one

  A developer passed along a question from a customer to our internal mailing list for C# questions the other day. Consider the following: public class C { public static void M() { /*whatever*/ } } public class D : C { public new static void M() { /*whatever*/ Read More... Posted Thursday, June 14, 2007 1:24 PM by Eric Lippert | 25 Comments Filed under: C#, Static Methods

• Bad Names

  Over the past year and a half of working on the C# compiler we’ve refactored a lot of crufty old code. But a surprising number of the “refactorings” have actually simply been renaming a structure, class, or method to something more sensible. The compiler Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:59 AM by Eric Lippert | 9 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality

• FYI: C# and VB Closures are per-scope

  This post assumes that you understand how closures are implemented in C#. They're implemented in essentially the same way in the upcoming version of Visual Basic. As Raymond and Grant point out in their various articles on the subject, the question of Read More... Posted Wednesday, June 06, 2007 3:18 PM by Eric Lippert | 8 Comments Filed under: C#, Lambda Expressions