Events

Of 19 Trump-branded product lines available in 2015, only 2 remain on the market. One wonders why: In recent weeks, only two said they are still selling Trump-branded goods. One is a Panamanian company selling Trump bed linens and home goods. The other is a Turkish companyselling Trump furniture. Of the rest, some Trump partners quit in reaction to campaign-trail rhetoric on immigrants and Muslims. Others said their licensing agreements had expired. Others said nothing beyond confirming that they’d...

We had an absolutely beautiful day in Chicago yesterday. I ate lunch outside after going for a walk to obtain it. Birds sang. Trees started budding. The sun shone. And then, suddenly, the sun didn't shine anymore: Chicago lies in the transition zone between cold air to the north and mild, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and where the boundary passes a point in its gradual southward push, the temperature drop is remarkable. On Thursday afternoon the boundary, actually a sharp cold front...

Day 12 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge will introduce you to LINQ, another way .NET makes your life easier. LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query, which Microsoft describes as follows: Traditionally, queries against data are expressed as simple strings without type checking at compile time or IntelliSense support. Furthermore, you have to learn a different query language for each type of data source: SQL databases, XML documents, various Web services, and so on. With LINQ, a query is a first-class...

Eddie Lampert's reign of terror against Sears continued today when the chain announced the closing of their very last store in Chicago: Sears, founded in Chicago and facing mounting troubles, is closing its last store in the city. Employees at the store at Six Corners in the Old Irving Park neighborhood were told of the closure Thursday morning, spokesman Howard Riefs said in an email. The store will close in mid-July after a liquidation sale set to begin April 27. The Sears Auto Center will close in...

Edward McClelland essays on the decline of the white blue-collar Midwest, as expressed linguistically: The “classic Chicago” accent, with its elongated vowels and its tendency to substitute “dese, dem, and dose” for “these, them, and those,” or “chree” for “three,” was the voice of the city’s white working class. “Dese, Dem, and Dose Guy,” in fact, is a term for a certain type of down-to-earth Chicagoan, usually from a white South Side neighborhood or an inner-ring suburb. The classic accent was most...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge continues on Day 11 with key-value pairs and simple tuples. A tuple is a finite ordered list of elements. In mathematics, you usually see them surrounded by parentheses and delineated with commas, like so: (2, 3, 5, 8, 13). .NET has several generic Tuple classes with 2 through 7 items in the sequence, plus a KeyValuePair structure that is the equivalent of Tuple. I'm actually not a fan of the Tuple class, though I get why it exists. I prefer naming...

House Speaker and Sophomore Class President Paul Ryan has decided he won't run for re-election this year: The latest and most high-profile departure from Congress, he joins dozens of Republicans who have resigned or retired ahead of the 2018 midterms,according to a Congressional Casualty List. According to an NBC News count, Ryan is the 24th House Republican who has decided not to seek re-election this cycle. His departure had been rumored for months. Back home in his Wisconsin district, there are...

For day 10 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'd like to give a shout out to a Czech company that has made my life so much easier over the past five years: JetBrains. Specifically, their flagship .NET accelerator tool ReSharper makes .NET development so much easier I can't even remember life without it. (If you've downloaded the code samples for this challenge, you may have seen either in the code or in the Git log references to ReSharper, usually when I turned off an inspection for a line or two.) I'm...

Day 9 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings up one of the key concepts in object-oriented design: the interface. In object-oriented design, rule #1 is "program to interfaces, not to implementation." In other words, when interacting with an object in your system, you should care about what behaviors and data you need to use, not what the object actually does with them. Going back to last week's room-and-window example: the original problem was that I want to close all the windows in the house with one...

For the first time in the institution's 229 years, a sitting U.S. Senator—from my own state, no less—has given birth: Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) gave birth Monday to a baby girl, the first time a sitting senator has delivered a child and one of just 10 female lawmakers to bear a child while serving in Congress. Duckworth, 50, and her husband, Bryan Bowlsbey, named their daughter Maile Pearl Bowlsbey after Bowlsbey’s great aunt. Pearl Bowlseby Johnson was an Army nurse during World War II. Duckworth...