Today I’ve been reviewing the ECMA-334 C# specification, and in particular the section about class instance constructors. I was struck by this piece in a clause about default constructors: If a class contains no instance constructor declarations, a default instance constructor is automatically provided. That default constructor simply invokes the parameterless constructor of the direct … Continue reading To base() or not to base(), that is the question →

First note: this blog post is very much tongue in cheek. I’m not actually planning on using the idea. But it was too fun not to share. As anyone following my activity on GitHub may be aware, I’ve been quite a lot of work on Protocol Buffers recently – in particular, a mostly-new port for … Continue reading “Sideways overriding” with partial methods →

At the moment, I’m spending a fair amount of time thinking about a new version of the C# API and codegen for Protocol Buffers, as well as other APIs for interacting with Google services. While that’s the context for this post, I want to make it very clear that this is still a personal post, … Continue reading Backwards compatibility is (still) hard →

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? →