This post is partly meant to be a general announcement, and partly meant to be something I can point people at in the future (rather than writing a short version of this on each email). These days, I get at least a few emails practically every day along the lines of: "I saw you on Stack Overflow, and would like you to answer this development question for me..." It's clear that the author: Is aware of Stack Overflow Is aware that Stack Overflow is a site for development Q&A Is aware that I answ[...]

I'm getting fairly frequent questions - mostly on Twitter - about whether there's going to be a third edition of C# in Depth. I figure it's worth answering it once in some detail rather than repeatedly in 140 characters ;) I'm currently writing a couple of new chapters covering the new features in C# 5 - primarily async, of course. The current "plan" is that these will be added to the existing 2nd edition to create a 3rd edition. There will be minimal changes to the existing text of the 2nd edition - basi[...]

This morning I was wrestling with trying to make some Noda Time unit tests faster. For some reason, the continuous integration host we're using is really slow at loading resources under .NET 4. The unit tests which run in 10 seconds on my home laptop take over three hours on the continuous integration system. Taking stack traces at regular intervals showed the problem was with the NodaFormatInfo constructor, which reads some resources. I may look into streamlining the resource access later, but before we [...]

(Note that this is deliberately not posted in the Noda Time blog. I reckon it's of wider interest from a design perspective, and I won't be posting any of the equivalent Noda Time code. I'll just say now that we don't have this sort of craziness in Noda Time, and leave it at that...) A few weeks ago, I was answering a Stack Overflow question when I noticed an operation around dates and times which should have been losing information apparently not doing so. I investigated further, and discovered some "int[...]

To some readers, the title of this post may induce nightmarish recollections of late-night debugging sessions. To others it may be simply the epitome of jargon. Just to break the jargon down a bit: Type initializer: the code executed to initialize the static variables of a class, and the static constructor Circular dependency: two bits of code which depend on each other - in this case, two classes whose type initializers each require that the other class is initialized A quick example of the kin[...]