Earlier, I came across this Stack Overflow question. I solved it, tweeted it, but then thought it would serve as a useful case study into the mental processes I go through when trying to solve a problem - whether that's on Stack Overflow, at work, or at home. It's definitely worth reading the original question, but the executive summary is: When I compute the checksum/hash of c:\Windows\System32\Calc.exe using various tools and algorithms, those tools all give the same answer for each algorithm. When [...]

A while I ago I blogged about what had changed under the hood of async between the CTP and the VS11 Preview. Well, now that the VS11 Beta is out, it's time to do it all again... Note that the code in this post is in the Eduasync codebase, under a different solution (Eduasync VS11.sln). Many of the old existing projects won't compile with VS11 beta, but I'd rather leave them as they are for posterity, showing the evolution of the feature. Stephen Toub has an excellent blog post covering some of this, so w[...]

Noda Time is nearing v1.0, which means I'm spending more time writing documentation than code. It also means reviewing the APIs we've got with a critical eye - whether that's removing extraneous members, adding useful ones, or moving things around. (In particular, writing documentation often suggests where a change would make calling code read more naturally.) This post is about one particular section of the API, and the choices available. Although I do go into some detail around the specific calls involv[...]

This is a slightly odd post, and before you read it you should probably put yourself into one of three buckets: Someone who doesn't care too much about functional programming, and finds higher order functions tricky: feel free to skip this post entirely. Someone who knows all about functional programming, and already knows the difference between currying and partial function application: please read this post carefully and post comments about any inaccuracies you find. (Yes, the CAPTCHA is broken o[...]

Today's post involves the MagicOrdering project in source control (project 28). When I wrote part 16 of Eduasync, showing composition in the form of majority voting, one reader mailed me a really interesting suggestion. We don't really need to wait for any of the tasks to complete on each iteration of the loop - we only need to wait for the next task to complete. Now that sounds impossible - sure, it's great if we know the completion order of the tasks, but half the point of asynchrony is that many things[...]