Jason Whittington

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish! - Dr. Seuss, 1960 My favorite construct in the C# programming language has to be the foreach loop. I get a little jolt of pleasure every time I use it. I can enumerate rows in SQL Queries, nodes in XML documents, ArrayLists, and Hashtables. You name it, I can enumerate it all without mucking around with a single loop conditional. foreach is super convenient to use, but I don't use it as much as I should in my own programs because writing the code to support foreach is tedious and dull. Personally I'd much rather be off doing some kind of asynchronous bind to a Web service thing than grinding out yet another iterator class. That's a shame because iterators can be used for a lot more than just enumerating data structures. So I was happy to find that in C# 2.0 the dreary work is largely a relic of the past. The introduction of ... (more)

Beyond Objects - Alternate Managed Languages

When I was in junior high school music was one of the most important factors in life. Few things were more important than being up-to-the-minute on which bands were "cool" and which were to be eschewed. Regardless of what genre you liked, yesterday's bands sucked and today's bands ruled. So it is with the software industry. At any given moment there are the "cool" technologies (as I write this the prevailing attitude is that Web services rule) and the has-beens (COM was cool but now seems positively dowdy). I don't think this is necessarily unhealthy ­ experimentation is the only... (more)

A Support Group of Sorts

Eighteen months ago Microsoft upset the Win32 apple cart by announcing a new execution technology and promptly labeling it with the ActiveX-esque name of "Microsoft .NET." I think it's safe to say that life hasn't been the same since for anyone who works with Windows. .NET makes it seductively easy to write code that just seems to work. No more puzzling through WNDENUMPROC or IUnknown** or malloc/free ­ all that grungy stuff is handled for you. I've observed that when confronted with this prospect developers tend to react in one of two ways. Some developers shrug and happily accep... (more)