Readers who follow me on Twitter or Google+ know this already, but… The third edition of C# in Depth is now available for early access from its page on the Manning website. I’ve been given a special discount code which expires at midnight EST on February 17th, so be quick if you want to use it – it gives 50% off either version. The code is “csharpsk”. It’s likely that we’ll have a separate (permanent) discount for readers who already own the second edition, but the details of that haven’t been decided ye[...]

Gosh it feels like a long time since I’ve blogged – particularly since I’ve blogged anything really C#-language-related. At some point I want to blog about my two CodeMash 2013 sessions (making the C# compiler/team cry, and learning lessons about API design from the Spice Girls) but those will take significant time – so here’s a quick post about object and collection initializers instead. Two interesting little oddities... Is it an object initializer? Is it a collection initializer? No, it’s a syntax err[...]

My earlier post on how to write a good question is pretty long, and I suspect that even when I refer people to it, often they don't bother reading it. So here's a short list of questions to check after you've written a question (and to think about before you write the question): Have you done some research before asking the question? 1 Have you explained what you've already tried to solve your problem? Have you specified which language and platform you're using, including version number where relevant[...]

Go get Noda Time 1.0! NuGet package (and the testing package) Project home page Project downloads page v1.0 user guide v1.0 API reference Today is the end of the longest release cycle I've been personally involved in. On November 5th 2009, I announced my intention to write a port of Joda Time for .NET. The next day, Noda Time was born - with a lofty (foolhardy) set of targets. Near the end of a talk *about* Noda Time this evening, I released Noda Time 1.0.0. It's taken t[...]

This weekend, I was writing some demo code for the async chapter of C# in Depth - the idea was to decompile a simple asynchronous method and see what happened. I received quite a surprise during this, in a way which had nothing to do with asynchrony. Given that at execution time, text refers to an instance of System.String, and assuming nothing in the body of the loop captures the ch variable, how would you expect the following loop to be compiled? foreach (char ch in text) {     // Body here [...]