I see a lot of problems which look somewhat different at first glance, but all have the same cause: Text is losing "special characters" when I transfer it from one computer to another Decryption ends up with garbage Compressed data can’t be decompressed I can transfer text but not binary data These are all cases […]

As I begin to write this, I'm in a small cubicle in Philadelphia airport, on my way back from CodeMash - a wonderful conference (yet again) which I feel privileged to have attended. Personal top highlights definitely include Dustin Campbell's talk on C# 6 (I'm practically dribbling with anticipation - bits please!) and playing Settlers of Catan on an enormous board. Kevin Pilch-Bisson's talk on scriptcs was fabulous too, not least because he demonstrated its NuGet support using Noda Time. I'm very likely t[...]

As I begin to write this, I’m in a small cubicle in Philadelphia airport, on my way back from CodeMash – a wonderful conference (yet again) which I feel privileged to have attended. Personal top highlights definitely include Dustin Campbell’s talk on C# 6 (I’m practically dribbling with anticipation – bits please!) and playing Settlers […]

It feels a little odd even to write this post, but I receive quite a few emails asking me for advice on how to get better at programming, how to get through interviews, whether it's better to be a generalist or a specialist etc. I want to make it very clear right from the start, I am not a career guidance expert. I have very little evidence that this is good advice, and it may well not be good advice for you even if it's good advice in general. Oh, and don't expect anything shockingly insightful or origina[...]

(I've ended up commenting on this issue on Stack Overflow quite a few times, so I figured it would be worth writing a blog post to refer to in the future.) There are lots of ways of converting values from one type to another – either changing the compile-time type but actually keeping the value the same, or actually changing the value (for example converting int to double). This post will not go into all of those - it would be enormous - just two of them, in one specific situation. The situation we're in[...]