We live in a golden age of static analysis. No matter what language you’re developing in, it’s likely that there’s a static analysis tool close at hand, and it might even be built into your compiler. If you’re using Go, maybe it’s staticcheck. If you’re a rustacean, you’ve probably heard…

This is a short post — barely an article. You can read it over your morning coffee or tea and then scroll onward. I was going through a codebase the other day and I noticed a lot of methods doing effectively the same thing in two different ways: public static…

With .NET 7 and C# 11 out last week, I thought this would be a good excuse for me to put my fingers to the keyboard and write up a summary on some of the latest C# features, as much for my edification as your own. Required Members This feature is straightforward…

Today’s article is about a few surprising behaviors that I’ve stumbled upon lurking in the C# language and its libraries. I wouldn’t go as far as to call them bugs, but they’re the sort of things that can catch you off guard if you’re not careful. Nullable Math The first of these…

As most of you are probably already aware, YouTube recently removed the dislike count. This was done shortly after YouTube had performed an experiment where they hid the dislike count from certain users. One of the observations made was that hiding the dislike count resulted in users clicking the dislike…

I just wanted to spin off a quick rant about GDPR-related cookie consent messages, because they’ve gotten out of control. Before starting to write this I captured some examples from a few news websites:

I recently posed the following question to my team: Which representation of the empty string do we prefer for our project?: A) "" B) string.Empty I brought this question up because we decided to use StyleCop Analyzers, which has a rule encouraging developers to prefer string.Empty over "". But rather…

I love learning, not so much in a resume-padding, career-oriented, watch-code-monkey-invert-binary-tree sort of way, but as a personal activity, a “I like knowing things” John Conway-esque sort of way. Learning for your own sake, and not just for your employer’s, is a very important topic that deserves its own article…

I recently had the opportunity to work on a team of Ruby developers. For reasons, the project we were working on was to use .NET, so these developers needed to get up to speed with C# so that they could begin cranking out code. It was an interesting experience for…