Events

Earlier this week, the Post reported on data that one of the scariest predictions of anthropogenic climate change theory seems to be coming true: The new research, based on ocean measurements off the coast of East Antarctica, shows that melting Antarctic glaciers are indeed freshening the ocean around them. And this, in turn, is blocking a process in which cold and salty ocean water sinks below the sea surface in winter, forming “the densest water on the Earth,” in the words of study lead author...

We're in the home stretch. It's day 23 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge and it's time to loop-the-loop. C# has a number of ways to iterate over a collection of things, and a base interface that lets you know you can use an iterator. The simplest ways to iterate over code is to use while, which just keeps looping until a condition is met: var n = 1; while (n < 6) { Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}"); n++; } Console.WriteLine("Done"); while is similar to do: var n = 1; do { Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}"); n++...

Longtime readers know how much I loathe Eddie Lampert for what he did to Sears and for how perfectly he demonstrates the dangers of slavishly following a philosophy that owes a lot to the thought processes of adolescent boys. Well, my longtime predictions seem to be coming true. Lampert has offered to buy the best bits of Sears (i.e., its real estate and Kenmore brand), which would quickly kill the company. Crain's Joe Cahill outlines some of the offal in this awful person's proposal: It's not clear...

For my second attempt at this post (after a BSOD), here (on time yet!) is day 22 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today's topic: the var keyword, which has sparked more religious wars since it emerged in 2007 than almost every other language improvement in the C# universe. Before C# 3.0, the language required you to declare every variable explicitly, like so: using System; using InnerDrive.Framework.Financial; Int32 x = 123; // same as int x = 123; Money m = 123; Starting with C# 3.0, you could do this...

For day 21 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I'm going to wade into a religious debate: UUIDs vs. integers for database primary keys. First, let's define UUID, which stands for Universally Unique Identifier. A UUID comprises 32 hexadecimal digits typically displayed in 5 groups separated by dashes. The actual identifier is 128 bits long, meaning the chance of a collision between any two of them is slightly lower than the chance of finding a specific grain of dust somewhere in the solar system. An...

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...