Visual Studio 2008 has lots of goodies in it, like LINQ syntax, CSS editing, and testing tools. There’s a lesser-known feature which I really appreciate though – the “Remove and Sort Usings” command in the C# editor. You activate the command by placing your cursor over the using statements and clicking on the right mouse-button.

I was recently reading Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition, and came across this piece of example Ruby code: [1,3,5,7].inject(0) {|sum, element| sum+element} -> 16 [1,3,5,7].inject(1) {|product, element| product*element} -> 105 Inject is a method which acts on an array by aggregating or accumulating the values within that array. It loops through the [...]

Dude! I got quoted! And by none other than Rob Conery of SubSonic fame. It seems like my last post caused quite an unexpected stir. Thanks to both Rob and Scott for taking the time to answer me. I really appreciate it.

Scott Hanselman just posted his latest article in his weekly source code series. He shows various ways of producing the Fibonacci Sequence using various languages. I found it really interesting, for two reasons: I tried to do the C#3.0 one on my own after listening to a podcast about F#, and never could work it [...]

One of the biggest questions with Anonymous Types is “can I pass them around?” If not, why not? Can you do something like this, for example: var GetAnonymousValue() { return new { Name = “Richard Bushnell” }; } void Main() { var value = GetAnonymousValue(); var name = value.Name;} The answer is simple: no, you [...]

Name Use Automatic Property Summary You have a property in a class which just wraps a field of the same type, and simply returns or sets that field. private string _field1; public string Field1 { get { return _field1; } set { _field1 = value; } } Becomes: public string Field1 { get; set; } [...]

My last post gave a simple idea of how to do a Mixin with C#. Rather than repeating what someone else has already done, if you want to see a more complex example of what can be done, check out Create Mixins with Interfaces and Extension Methods by Bill Wagner at MSDN.com.

I really like Scott Hanselmann’s idea to write an indefinite series of posts about reading code to be a better developer. I’m going to copy his idea, and write a series of my own. Since its first version, C# has evolved from being a Java clone to something much more dynamic. I’ve noticed that developers [...]