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May 2004 - Posts

TechEd from a Java Persective...

I've been reading a series of posts by N. Alex Rupp on his experiences at TechEd, and his thoughts on the Microsoft and Java communities. I'm especially interested in this because I'm going to JavaOne at the end of the month...
Posted by ericgu | 8 Comments

Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

On Wednesday night, I spent some time at the O'Reilly reception. In the SWAG bags that they gave us was a copy of the book, Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. The O'Reilly website has this to say about the book: "Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from
Posted by ericgu | 10 Comments
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No longer Large, and rarely in charge...

For those of you who have never met me, I'm approximately 6'2” tall, and currently weigh about 168 pounds. For all of my (reasonably) adult life, I've been a “Large”. If I needed a T-shirt, or a coat, or a sweatshirt, I was always a
Posted by ericgu | 33 Comments

Nullable types in C#

Nullable Types in C# One of the "late breaking" features in C# 2.0 is what is known as "Nullable Types". The details can be found in the C# 2.0 language spec . Nullable types address the scenario where you want to be able to have a primitive type with
Posted by ericgu | 95 Comments
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Join the fridge-o-lution

Last night, I attended a TechEd bloggers party, held in a pretty nice suite on the 40th floor of the Hyatt. (Not the 4th floor, as many of us had assumed. I realized later that this is because I'm used to the Microsoft buildings that I work in, where
Posted by ericgu | 7 Comments

Best practices talk

I gave my Teched talk at 5PM today, entitled “C# Best Practices - What's wrong with this code?”. Rather than take a more lecture-based approach, I tried something more interactive. It was an interesting, if not fully successful talk. If you
Posted by ericgu | 15 Comments
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Still more on virtual by default...

In a bid to keep my blog hits high, I've decided to revisit this again. The comments (I read all comments, though I don't respond to all of them) have been fairly split. There has one group who agrees with me, and another group that is opposed to my perspective.
Posted by ericgu | 11 Comments
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Updated C# V2.0 Specifications now available

After a lot of work on Anders' part, we now have an updated version of the C# 2.0 Language Specification on the website. Not only does it have updated information on the “big 4” - Generics, iterators, anonymous methods, and partial classes,
Posted by ericgu | 21 Comments
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TechEd and tempting the slide gods...

About 4 or 5 weeks ago, the C# team was working on our TechEd presentations. There's an organized (ish) process to get all the speakers to get their slides done in a timely manner, but we decided to add a bit more rigor on top of that process, so that
Posted by ericgu | 5 Comments
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Best C# Bloggers

Here is a summary of the community-recommended bloggers . Ian Griffiths Craig Andera Wesner Moise Frans Bouma Brad Wilson John Lam Clemens Vasters Ted Neward Steve Maine Roy Osherove Miguel de Icaza Justin Rogers Ingo Rammer Niels Berglund Richard Blewet
Posted by ericgu | 25 Comments
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More on virtual by default

Gary and James took issue with my position, so I'd like to expand a bit on what I said. Gary wrote: Eric suggests that final should be used in most cases with virtual reserved for the special occasions. I totally disagree, you can't lay down the law as
Posted by ericgu | 37 Comments
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TechEd and Rio

For TechEd attendees, you can request meetings with Microsoft people through the Rio system. I went to look at my schedule, and found out that either nobody had requested a meeting with me, or I couldn't get to my meeting requests. Have any of you tried
Posted by ericgu | 11 Comments
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Virtual by default or not?

I've been skimming through “Hardcore Java”, and I came across a section on the use of 'final' in Java. In it, one of Simmons' comments (okay, I'm not sure it's his comment because he's listed as editor and not author, but that sounds better
Posted by ericgu | 29 Comments
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See Cyrus' head explode...

Cyrus is one of the devs on the editor/intellisense/refactoring team (we call it the IDE team, which is the totally wrong name to use with customers) got his blog set up last Friday, and has already written 29 posts.
Posted by ericgu | 0 Comments
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On probation

I got an email today from the owner of all the MSDN columns, telling me that if I wasn't able to produce a column every other month, my column would be put on probation, and then cancelled. I'm frankly surprised it took this long - the whole essence of
Posted by ericgu | 25 Comments
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Books on my desk

I have a couple of books that have showed up on my desk recently. The first is “ Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET ”, by James Newkirk and Alexei Vorontsov. They started writing the book while working at ThoughtWorks , though Jim is
Posted by ericgu | 6 Comments
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TechEd and the C# team

The deadline for the C# team to have our TechEd slides done is this Friday, so we've been working hard on our slides. My talk (DEV320 - C# Best Practices: What's wrong with this code?) has been taking a lot of time, but I think it's finally shaping up,
Posted by ericgu | 3 Comments
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Enums and validation

We've been talking about enums a bit, in one of those cases where I'm looking into something and I then get a request about that same thing from some other source. Or multiple sources, as it happened this time. Yesterday, I was working on my TechEd presentation
Posted by ericgu | 24 Comments
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App Building day 3 - data smoothing...

I worked some more on my GPS app, and I'm looking for some advice from somebody with more experience in dealing with chunky data than I do. One of the problems that I have with the GPS data that I get is that it's noisy. First of all the altitude data
Posted by ericgu | 13 Comments
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App Building - Day 2

Today was the second day of app building. But first, a few comments on the comments on my last post. One set of comments is around what I meant by “real apps”. It's true that when I say “real apps”, I don't mean the sort of apps
Posted by ericgu | 3 Comments
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App Building

The C# PM team is spending Wednesday-Friday of this week on app building, where we spend time using the product to write real apps. We book a conference room in a building away from our main building, put OOF messages on our email, and then spend our
Posted by ericgu | 14 Comments
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Flyin'

My long-term readers know that I'm in training for a couple of bicycle rides later this summer (a century in June, and a two-day double century in August). The rest of you haven't had the joy of reading endless descriptions of my cycling exploits, but
Posted by ericgu | 4 Comments
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C# Community Review

One of my responsibilities is overseeing the C# team's involvement in community, where community is anything we do that has direct customer touch. Everything from working with MVPs to design reviews on new features to the C# Dev Center. Duncan , Dan ,
Posted by ericgu | 24 Comments

Canis Novus

After fighting a spirited but doomed-to-fail delaying action for several years, the two caniphiles in the family finally overcame my defenses on Saturday, and there's a new addition to the household. He's part Australian Cattle dog, and part unspecified
Posted by ericgu | 4 Comments
 
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