A little while ago I was contacted about a new merge tool from the company behind PlasticSCM. (I haven't used Plastic myself, but I'd heard of it.) My initial reaction was that I wasn't interested in anything which required me to learn yet another source control system, but SemanticMerge is independent of PlasticSCM. My interested was piqued when I learned that SemanticMerge is actually built on Roslyn. I don't generally care much about implementation details, but I'm looking out for uses of Roslyn outsid[...]

Background I've been to a few talks on SOLID before. Most of the principles seem pretty reasonable to me – but I've never "got" the open-closed principle (OCP from here on). At CodeMash this year, I mentioned this to the wonderful Cori Drew, who said that she'd been at a user group talk where she felt it was explained well. She mailed me a link to the user group video, which I finally managed to get round to watching last week. (The OCP part is at around 1 hour 20.) Unfortunately I still wasn't satisfied[...]

Readers who follow me on Twitter or Google+ know this already, but… The third edition of C# in Depth is now available for early access from its page on the Manning website. I’ve been given a special discount code which expires at midnight EST on February 17th, so be quick if you want to use it – it gives 50% off either version. The code is “csharpsk”. It’s likely that we’ll have a separate (permanent) discount for readers who already own the second edition, but the details of that haven’t been decided ye[...]

Gosh it feels like a long time since I’ve blogged – particularly since I’ve blogged anything really C#-language-related. At some point I want to blog about my two CodeMash 2013 sessions (making the C# compiler/team cry, and learning lessons about API design from the Spice Girls) but those will take significant time – so here’s a quick post about object and collection initializers instead. Two interesting little oddities... Is it an object initializer? Is it a collection initializer? No, it’s a syntax err[...]

My earlier post on how to write a good question is pretty long, and I suspect that even when I refer people to it, often they don't bother reading it. So here's a short list of questions to check after you've written a question (and to think about before you write the question): Have you done some research before asking the question? 1 Have you explained what you've already tried to solve your problem? Have you specified which language and platform you're using, including version number where relevant[...]