User input can come from a variety of locations: You must test input from data files as well as interactive controls. Writing user input validation is pedantic and error-prone but very necessary. Trusting user input can cause anything from exception conditions to SQL injection attacks. None of the o... [More]

Experienced Windows programmers are familiar with writing the code to place data values in controls and to store values from controls: public Form1 : Form { private MyType myDataValue; private TextBox textBoxName; private void InitializeComponent( ) { textBoxName.Text = myDataValue.Name; thi... [More]

In our quest to avoid hard-coding configuration and settings information, we have created many different strategies for storing configuration information. In our quest to get it right, we kept improving and changing our minds about where to put such information. INI files? That was so Windows 3.1. Y... [More]

Problems happen. They don't always happen in the lab, on machines you can easily debug. The problems you can't fix always seem to occur on one user's machine in the field, with no debugging environment and no way to figure out the cause. Experienced developers have learned to build in the capability... [More]

Many .NET classes provide two different ways to handle events from the system. You can attach an event handler, or you can override a virtual function in the base class. Why provide two ways of doing the same thing? Because different situations call for different methods, that's why. Inside derived ... [More]

The cost and inconvenience of a communication protocol dictates how you should use the medium. You communicate differently using the phone, fax, letters, and email. Think back on the last time you ordered from a catalog. When you order by phone, you engage in a question-and-answer session with the s... [More]

Not everybody needs to see everything. Not every type you create needs to be public. You should give each type the least visibility necessary to accomplish your purpose. That's often less visibility than you think. Internal or private classes can implement public interfaces. All clients can access t... [More]

This item should really be titled "Build Assemblies That Are the Right Size and Contain a Small Number of Public Types." But that's too wordy, so I titled it based on the most common mistake I see: developers putting everything but the kitchen sink in one assembly. That makes it hard to reuse compon... [More]

Enumerator -- A State Machine. A  .NET 1.0 enumerator is basically a state machine object that implements the following interface: public interface IEnumerator {     object Current { get; }     bool MoveNext();     void Reset(); } The current... [More]

Enumerator -- A State Machine. A  .NET 1.0 enumerator is basically a state machine object that implements the following interface: public interface IEnumerator {     object Current { get; }     bool MoveNext();     void Reset(); } The current... [More]

Download code   Introduction This is a very small article to illustrate C# access modifiers. This article is for beginners but even if you are an expert this article may be useful as a quick reminder when the brain cells slow down - hey, I will probably need it soon.   Definitio... [More]

Download code   In this article I want to show you an approach of how can a structured enumeration be handled by the C#. Background While playing with my little home project I stumbled upon a problem of having all those category enumerations displayed in a tree. I wanted to keep it simpl... [More]

In this article I hope to show you how to use attributes to create a dynamic converter so that you do not need to create a new converter for every conversion. I developed this to facilitate me in converting a DTO object to a Domain (Entity) object. What this article assumes you know or have: ... [More]

As experienced programmers, in whatever language we favored before C#, we internalized several practices for developing more efficient code. Sometimes what worked in our previous environment is counterproductive in the .NET environment. This is very true when you try to hand-optimize algorithms for ... [More]

The .NET environment is language agnostic: Developers can incorporate components written in different .NET languages without limitations. In practice, it's almost true. You must create assemblies that are compliant with the Common Language Subsystem (CLS) to guarantee that developers writing program... [More]