ThoughtShapes Shaping Ideas With Thought

Every day I work I wish for a single feature in Visual Studio: the ability to move a code file from Visual Studio to another monitor. I can't stand the fact that I can't do this! Even if I switch to MDI view Visual Studio only lets each window move around within Visual Studio and not to other monitors. I would love to have a few code files dispersed on various monitors so that I can see more of what I'm doing at any given time.

In this day and age is this too much to ask? Why the constraint?

Delegates are ubiquitous throughout .NET development though many developers are not aware of their full range. This stems from the fact that few books or articles do a good job tying together all ways in which delegates may be used. Additionally there are often misconceptions over delegate semantics - how to construct a delegate within a given context. This post seeks to clarify the muddy water around delegates by use of demonstrative tests. Each test is explicitly named for the semantic it demonstrates and internally each test asserts expected behavior. As the title implies, this post is not intended as an introduction to delegates. If you are looking for such material Juval Lowy does a decent job here.

Over the last few days I’ve been working on a high priority performance issue for a client. This issue arose not long after they started using the .NET 2.0 framework, and it was a big enough issue to delay an impending release to clients. I was told that when certain elements on the screen were refreshed by clicking a “Refresh” button, that the performance of the application paired with .NET 2.0 was not acceptable—although it was when paired with .NET 1.1. I was also told the bottleneck occurred in the DataSet.Merge method.

What do you call a Singleton that does not prevent more than one instance from being created? I call it confused. That is precisely what I was upon discovering the default effect of WellKnownObjectMode.Singleton in .NET Remoting. As I worked around this default behavior I realized my discovery and solution would be useful to others. This post discusses the differences between Singleton and Monostate, proves why a Remoting Singleton is Monostate by default, and shows how to design a true Singleton for .NET Remoting. It also includes several unit-testing tricks along the way!