In my last two posts, I have been developing a small utility library to do the grunt work of copying data from an instance of one class to an instance of another type. The Copier class from my last post allows me to copy all public properties from one class to another class as long [...]

In my last post, I created a method that does the grunt work of copying data from an instance of one class to an instance of another type. I often find myself copying data between the properties of my data layer classes and those of my user interface like this.

// Copy the data from the [...]

One thing that I find tiresome when using the various Model/View patterns is the constant copying of data between the model and the view. Too often, I find myself writing code like this to copy data between an ICustomer and an ICustomerView;

// Copy the data from the customer to the view
view.Address = customer.Address;
view.Country = customer.Country;
view.FirstName [...]

Today I was working writing auto-updating for some software. I wanted to base it on the Product Version property in the installer MSI file, so I needed some code to read that from the file.
It took a fair amount of searching and code tweaking, but I finally worked it all out.

Add a reference to [...]

Do you ever find yourself using DateTime to time a section of code?  Do you have code like the following?
DateTime start = DateTime.Now;

// Perform a long process
Thread.Sleep( 1968 );

DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
TimeSpan duration = end.Subtract( start );
Console.WriteLine( “This process took {0} ms”,
[...]

In log4net speak, an appender is an output destination for a log such as a file, the console, a database or even email.  log4net ships with so many appenders that most of us will never need to write our own.  There are cases where you may find a need for your own appender, for example, [...]

Unless you have been inspecting some of the code generated by Visual Studio, you probably haven’t realized that there are several attributes that you can add to your code to make debugging easier. Some prevent you from stepping into sections of code, others change the way variables are displayed in the watch window.
The following [...]

I have been migrating a large application from Win32/MFC to .NET and ran into an interesting problem. We store all of the application colors in the database as integers that represent the Win32 COLORREF value. COLORREF is just a DWORD representing the RGB value, so I thought that I could just take the value and get a .NET [...]

Another often overlooked C# statement that was introduced in .NET 2.0 is yield. This keyword is used to return items from a loop within a method and retain the state of the method through multiple calls. That is a bit hard to wrap your head around, so as always, an example will help;
public static IEnumerable<int> [...]

The first time I saw the ?? operator in C#, I did a double take and had to look it up. The operator, called the null coalescing operator was added in C# 2.0 and is pretty useful, but still fairly unknown.

Order order = GetOrder( id ) ?? new Order();
In the above code, if the return [...]