This is a post about a serious bug I turned up in the Microsoft C++ compilers that target CLI (both Managed C++ and C++/CLI). One of the key concepts in software engineering is Design by Contract.  Design by Contract boils down to “say what you do and do what you say.”  Essentially, when I make a semantic definition, I would like it to ...

This blog post will be about a practical example of using IEnumerable<T> to make solving common problems easier. Here’s a common abstract problem – walk a tree of nodes visiting each node and possibly perform an operation on a node’s contents.  An concrete version of that is finding one or more files within a file system. The typical ...

Michael Tiemann wrote this retrospective about working on GCC in 1987.  It’s an interesting look back on some of the aspects of change that gcc wrought.  I share some of his experience.  In 1992 or so, I was working on a PostScript laser printer for Adobe that was based on the Motorola 68000.  It was meant to be a low-cost ...

We had a question in our forums about face detection via OpenCV.  I had looked at OpenCV a few weeks ago and had a small amount of time to burn, so I decided that this would be a fun project to tackle.  The API for OpenCV is sane and their internal image format appears to be similar to what we use in dotImage, so getting AtalaImage ...

It’s been a very exciting week.  I actually had more things to post than time would allow me to write about.  I’ll have to save them for next time.   Blog: Daniel Spiewak’s What is Hindley-Milner? (and why is it cool?) Hindley-Milner is the algorithm all these fancy programming languages like F# and Haskell for type ...

I read an interesting article this morning by Reinier Zwitserloot on the topic of null subtypes in statically typed languages. The issue is that in Java and C# there are a number of different type modifiers for dealing with the concept of nullity. Because of this even a simple base type can be one of three separate somewhat incompatible ...

When you are handed a string, integer, or any value type, can you know what it really represents?  Can you define the range of appropriate behaviors for that data?  Can you tell if it's formatted correctly?   The problem is, in all of these cases, you can't.  You can't be sure of it's meaning, it's format or even how to ...

I'll be at New England Code Camp 10 tomorrow giving another talk about functional programming and concurrency in F#.  It will be fairly similar to my previous talks in terms of ideas and content, however, I have put a lot of work into making the functional programming ideas easier to understand. The code samples have also been updated ...

It has come to my attention via a recent DZone article that .NET 3.5 and 2.0 SP1 jointly included a new feature which lets you manipulate the way your garbage collector acts programmatically.  This can be done through changing the value of a new property of the System.Runtime.GCSettings class named LatencyMode. In this article I will walk you ...

After my last post, A Safe and Asynchronous One to Many Stream Copy Through IL and Inheritance”, I ordered a few books and spent some time playing with generating IL. Along the way I’ve developed a library which allows you to make a franken-clone of any object. You pass the method an object to clone along with a hash table of values to change, ...