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 ...

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, ...

Because .NET Streams have state, they are difficult to use in multithreaded environments. In this post I discuss ways to manage or work around problems arising from the statefulness of .NET Streams. I explain how this is possible both through traditional inheritance and also through some indulgence in hacking of object protection levels by ...

After my last blog post, due to some of the responses, I decided to spend some time with Smalltalk.  As a DotNET developer by trade, I wanted to see what kinds of options were available for use on the CLR.  Unfortunately, out of the five different DotNET Smalltalk flavors that have been created, not a single one is still under ...

In the previous article I discussed a few of the benefits of stack allocation as well as a couple of C# keywords which help you to leverage those benefits. However, the one megabyte default stack size is too small for stack allocation to be used with a large dataset. Alternatively, in some threading situations one megabyte per thread/fiber can ...

Articles in This Series Part 1 – Basic Housekeeping Part 2 – Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation Part 3 – Increasing the Size of your Stack Part 4 – Choosing the Right Garbage Collector Settings Part 5 – Changing Your Garbage Collector Settings on the Fly Introduction In C#, when you create managed objects or arrays of value ...

There are a great number of different ways to count the number of processors available to the .NET developer. In this post I will go over some of the more common methods and their pros and cons.   The Envirionment.ProcessorCount Way Code: Environment.ProcessorCount;  Supported Platforms: Windows 98 Or Greater, .NET 2.0 or ...

One of the most often cited reasons to not use .NET is that it is initially compiled to an intermediary language (MSIL) and has to be recompiled every time you run it. In many high performance environments this wasted time is simply unacceptable. To combat this Microsoft released a tool with .NET 1.1 called NGen (Native Image Generator) which ...