For a long time now, users of Visual Studio have been complaining about the lack of proper images, icons and other artwork in the package. VS always came along with some ancient artworks that have been delivered in that same unchanged form for many years now. The MSDN product feedback center has an entry for this issue and a huge number of people have been voting for a new set of artwork to be included with VS. Now Microsoft tells us they have finally done something about this! There are blog e …

Roy Osherove has some interesting references and arguments about explaining Pair Programming (to management mainly) in this blog post. A lot of additional information, as he also says, can be found here.

Well, I don’t. I never switch off my computer and I never quit the utilities that are running on it all the time. There may be better reasons for this than I have, but these are mine: I use it 14 hours a day anyway, and to boot my 3.4 GHz Athlon 64 system from a cold state into Windows XP, with all the tools running, it takes 19 minutes, that’s no exaggeration. In this context, there’s something I absolutely hate: most applications, even small ones, have routines these days that run “regularly” …

I just read a blog entry titled A word from the “Wise”: Don’t Use Exceptions on Alex Papadimoulis’ weblog. He describes in great length how a so-called MVP had told him that using exceptions was a bad idea and continues to prove in ten points why he doesn’t believe it. Well, not.

The only thing Alex proves is that he didn’t remotely understand what that MVP guy was (probably, I’m only guessing here, of course) talking about. The most important hint is one that Alex misses completely: The MVP s …

Many things change with the decision to work with purely object-oriented data in a specific situation. The outlook seems good: business processes and rules will be much easier to implement, completely typed data will be no problem at all and there’ll be no more structural problems trying to accomodate clumsy handling of records and rows in an otherwise OO application structure. There’ll be an object/relational mapping tool that takes care of all the persistence issues. There’s one thing though …

Most people working with WinForms have probably encountered that red X that is drawn over a control at some point and just doesn’t go away as long as the application is running. Originally, I had a look at the source of this some months ago and now, when I saw a relating question again, I thought I might document my findings here.

Note that I did that research with .NET 1 and I haven’t checked for .NET 2 yet, so in the latter case YMMV. So where does the re …

Ryan Byington describes a very interesting feature in the .NET implementation of regular expressions. Definitely worth a read!

Alright, consider the following situation: There’s a data class with two properties, Index and Content. There’s a specialised collection typed to contain instances of the data class. Something like this:

public class DataClass {
  public DataClass(string index, string content) {
    this.index = index;
    this.content = content;
  }

  string index;
  public string Index { get { return index; } }

  string content;
  public string Content { get { return content; } }
}

public cl ...