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API Design (RSS)
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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When developing my immutable collections library , I spent a lot of time on usability. After all, if a library is not useful then what’s the point? A big portion of usability is being able to work with existing frameworks and technologies. For .Net and
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I think the best answer is: rarely. It's really hard to go straight to a justification here though. I find that answering a different question will eventually shed led on when to create a new exception. "What are the benefits of
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I am a huge fan of read only/immutable collections and data. Hopefully the increased exposure through the blogosphere alerted users to the advantages of this type of programming for the appropriate scenarios. I wanted to discuss ReadOnlyCollection<T>
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Really this guideline is a bit longer but putting it all in a blog title seemed a bit too much. The full guideline should read: "If a generic class constructor arguments contain types of all generic parameters, provide a static method named
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Reference values are a powerful feature of C++ but I find they have one significant detractor. A developer can not look at an API call and determine if a parameter is being passed by reference or value (VB has the same problem). IMHO this is one item
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CComObject::CreateInstance is a light weight method for creating instances of COM objects in your code. Unfortunately the design of the API makes it easy to introduce subtle errors into your code. The two problems are it encourages manually ref counting
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