Events

Day 19 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge was Saturday, but Apollo After Hours drained me more or less completely for the weekend. So this morning, let's pretend it's still Saturday for just a moment, and consider one of the oddest classes in the .NET Base Class Library (BCL): System.String. A string is just a sequence of one or more characters. A character could be anything: a letter, a number, a random two-byte value, what have you. System.String holds the sequence for you and gives you some tools to...

Now that I've caught up, day 20 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge is just a few hours late. (The rest of the week should be back to noon UTC/7 am Chicago time.) Today's topic: Types. Everything in .NET is a type, even System.Type, which governs their metadata. Types exist in a hierarchy called the Common Type System (CTS). Distilled, there are two kinds of types: value types and reference types. I alluded to this distinction Saturday earlier today when discussing strings, which are reference types...

OK, I lied. I managed to find 15 minutes to bring you day 18 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, in which I'll discuss one of the coolest feature of the .NET ecosystem: reflection. Reflection gives .NET code the ability to inspect and use any other .NET code, full stop. If you think about it, the runtime has to have this ability just to function. But any code can use tools in the System.Reflection namespace. This lets you do some pretty cool stuff. Here's a (necessarily brief) example, from the Inner...

Day 18 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge...is postponed until tomorrow. And day 19 will be late as well. (Good thing I have Sunday off!) But hey, if you find yourself near Uptown Underground tonight and want to contribute to an excellent chorus, come on in!

I published today's A-to-Z post a little late because I've had a lot going on this week, between the Apollo Chorus benefit tomorrow, rehearsals, and taking care of Parker. Yesterday Parker got his sutures out. The vet said he's healing very well, no signs of infection or re-injury, and good progress on using the injured leg. He can go without the Cone of Shame while someone is observing him, and on Friday, he can have it off permanently. Both he and I really, really, really want that to happen. They...

Posting day 17 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge just a little late because of stuff (see next post). Apologies. Today's topic is querying, which .NET makes relatively easy through the magic of LINQ. Last week I showed how LINQ works when dealing with in-memory collections of things. In combination with Entity Framework, or another object-relational mapper (ORM), LINQ makes getting data out of your database a ton easier. When querying a database in a .NET application, you will generally need a database...

So far, this April ranks as the 2nd coldest in Chicago history. We had snow this past weekend, and we expect to have snow tonight—on April 18th. So it may come as a surprise to people who confuse "weather" and "climate" that, worldwide, things are pretty hot: The warm air to our north and east has blocked the cold air now parked over the midwestern U.S. Europe, meanwhile, feels like August. And Antarctica feels like...well, Antarctica, but unusually warm. Note that the temperature anomalies at the...

We're now past the half-way point, 16 days into the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Time to go back to object-oriented design fundamentals. OO design has four basic concepts: Inheritance Encapsulation Abstraction Polymorphism All four have specific meanings. Today we'll just look at polymorphism (from Greek: "poly" meaning many and "morph" meaning shape). Essentially, polymorphism means using the same identifiers in different ways. Let's take a contrived but common example: animals. Imagine you have a class...

A couple stories of interest: CityLab has a good explanation about why New York stopped building subways 80 years ago, and how that has caused epic transit problems today. Developers plan to build a new skyscraper in Chicago for $1 bn. At 433 m, it would be the second-tallest building in Chicago, just 9 m shorter than Willis Tower. Credit-card signatures are finally going away in the U.S. OK, back to being really too busy to breathe this week...

For day 15 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I want to talk about something that computer scientists use but application developers typically don't. Longtime readers of the Daily Parker know that I put a lot of stock in having a liberal arts education in general, and having one in my profession in specific. I have a disclosed bias against hiring people with computer science (CS) degrees unless they come from universities with rigorous liberal arts core requirements. Distilled down to the essence, I...