This blog post is effectively a log of my experience with the preview of the C# 8 nullable reference types feature. There are lots of caveats here: it’s mostly “as I go along” so there may well be backtracking. I’m not advising the right thing to do, as I’m still investigating that myself. And of … Continue reading First steps with nullable reference types →

I started writing a blog post about versioning in July 2017. I’ve mostly abandoned it, because I think the topic is too vast for a single post. It potentially needs a whole site/wiki/repository devoted to it. I hope to come back to it at some point, because I believe this is a hugely important topic … Continue reading Backward compatibility and overloading →

This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow. However, it’s been a long time coming. A while ago I started writing a similar post, but it got longer and longer without coming to any conclusion. I’m writing this one … Continue reading Stack Overflow Culture →

Background There are three things you need to know to start with: Operations on read-only variables which are value types copy the variable value first. I’ve written about this before on this blog. C# 7.2 addresses this by introducing the readonly modifier for structs. See the language proposal for more details. I was touched to … Continue reading Implementing IXmlSerializable in readonly structs →

For a while, I’ve been considering how useful nuget.org statistics are. I know there have been issues in the past around accuracy, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’ve been trying to work out what the numbers mean at all and whether that’s useful. I’ve pretty sure an older version of the nuget.org gallery … Continue reading NuGet package statistics →