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 [...]

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 [...]

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”, duration.TotalMilliseconds ); If you do, you should [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]