Overriding Static Members in C#

Yeah, you read that right. We’re gonna break some rules!

The importance of error messaging

When I was young, taking my first class in computer science, my mother told me about her experiences with computer programming coming through college in the late 70s.

We programmed with punch cards. You had to feed them into a computer to be analyzed, and if you got anything wrong, the computer output would simply be: “Error”.

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How to Version Assemblies Destined for Nuget

Okay. Seriously. Versioning of third-party Nuget packages has been the bane of my existence for the past week. Nuget declares that packages under its system should follow Sematic Versioning, and that’s great… for the package. But it becomes a problem when the same versioning scheme is followed for the assembly.

Microsoft Did It Wrong

It’s been several years since Microsoft announced that Newtonsoft’s Json.Net would be the default JSON serializer. If you deal with JSON communication over the web at all, you probably already know this. It’s not exactly news.

However, there does seem to be a small desire among those in the web development community who would like to use alternate serializers. Personally, I’d like to use my own serializer, Manatee.Json. I originally created it out of a dissatisfaction with Json.Net, and naturally (and perhaps from some bias) think it to be superior.

The Mother of Copy/Paste Errors

Sometimes, when we’re building an application, we need to run a script either before or after the build process. Fortunately, Microsoft took this need into consideration when they built Visual Studio. There, in the project properties, under Build (Compile if your one of those weird VBers), you have two multiline text boxes in which you can write your scripts: one for pre-build, and one for post-build. They even give you a button which opens a window with a scrollbar for when your script is more than three lines long. But still, something seems to be off with it. And this “something” is the primary cause of (read: what I’m blaming for) my latest computer panic/fiasco.

Nulls and Extension Methods

I recently came across this blog post in which the author provides a tip on how extension methods can be used, suggesting that they can be safely used on null objects. While his suggestion is valid, I cringed at the idea because it severely hampers code readability.