Ok, I admit, that title is a bit over the edge, but still that is how I feel. Developing for .NET is increasingly becoming not fun and far too expensive. The only reason to do it is because customers expect products for .NET, but under slowly increasing pressure from developers, that is going to change. [...]

I finally got around to putting up the source code for x2c under GPL. No, you haven’t heard of this thing and it may not seem immediately useful, but when it is useful, it’s incredibly useful. The hardest thing is coming up with full samples of what it can do, so I’ll just outline it [...]

“Meatloaf code” is code that is there since a long time but nobody remembers why it’s there but everyone still respects it and keeps writing things that way. I call that “meatloaf code” based on the following anecdote that I read in one of my books, except I can’t remember which one so I apologize [...]

… can read and understand several books with contradictory or complementary content without having their heads explode.
… and thus fear the one-book-religion as much as it deserves being feared.
… can understand, appreciate, and follow more than one methodology at the same time.
… know that no single book or methodology or language or tool or great [...]

There is a problem with Test Driven Development (TDD) and security. Even though I’m a severe proponent of TDD and do my own development (largely) that way, I notice a strong conflict between good architecture and TDD. I’ve also seen mention of this effect in the journals lately, so I’m not alone in this.
What happens [...]

After a bit of searching, I found a way to have strongly typed constant parameters for C# functions. You know the situation, where you need to pass one of a limited set of strings or chars or other values to a function and you want to make sure somebody doesn’t just go and pass any [...]

This falls in the category “neat tricks” and definitely under “DRY” (Don’t Repeat Yourself). When you have a list of constants that you need to save or retrieve, typically settings, you easily get into a situation where you have say 20 constant strings defining the names of your constants, and then a block of code [...]