There are many, many questions on Stack Overflow about both parsing and formatting date/time values. (I use the term “date/time” to mean pretty much “any type of chronlogical information” – dates, times of day, instants in time etc.) Given how often the same kinds of mistakes are made, I thought it would be handy to … Continue reading Common mistakes in date/time formatting and parsing →

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m part of the technical group looking at updating the ECMA-334 C# standard to reflect the C# 5 Microsoft specification. I recently made a suggestion that I thought would be uncontroversial, but which caused some discussion – and prompted this “request for comment” post, effectively. What does the standard say about … Continue reading Precedence: ordering or grouping? →

I’ve been getting a bit cross about backward compatibility recently. This post contains two examples of backward incompatibilities in .NET 4.6, and one example of broken code which isn’t being fixed due for backward compatibility reasons. Let me start off by saying this post is not meant to be seen as an attack on Microsoft. … Continue reading Backward compatibility pain →

The problem Invoking event handlers in C# has always been a bit of a pain, because an event with no subscribers is usually represented as a null reference. This leads to code like this: It’s important to use the handler local variable, as if instead you access the field twice, it’s possible that the last … Continue reading Clean event handler invocation with C# 6 →

Last week I learned that using static is going to be the syntax for importing static members (including extension methods) in C# 6. That fulfils a feature request I made in September 2005 (my fourth ever blog post, as it happens). With a feature request turnaround of 10 years, I figure I should get put … Continue reading C# 7 feature request #1… extension attributes →