Clik here to view.
R is for Reflection
OK, I lied. I managed to find 15 minutes to bring you day 18 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, in which I'll discuss one of the coolest feature of the .NET ecosystem: reflection.Reflection gives .NET...
View ArticleClik here to view.
S is for String
Day 19 of the Blogging A-to-Z challengewas Saturday, but Apollo After Hours drained me more or less completely for the weekend.So this morning, let's pretend it's still Saturday for just a moment, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
T is for Type
Now that I've caught up, day 20 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge is just a few hours late. (The rest of the week should be back to noon UTC/7 am Chicago time.)Today's topic: Types.Everything in .NET is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
U is for UUID
For day 21 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I'm going to wade into a religious debate: UUIDs vs. integers for database primary keys.First, let's define UUID, which stands for Universally Unique...
View ArticleClik here to view.
P is for Polymorphism
We're now past the half-way point, 16 days into the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Time to go back to object-oriented design fundamentals.OO design has four basic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
V is for var
For my second attempt at this post (after a BSOD), here (on time yet!) is day 22 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge.Today's topic: the var keyword, which has sparked more religious wars since it emerged...
View ArticleClik here to view.
W is for while (and other iterators)
We're in the home stretch. It's day 23 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge and it's time to loop-the-loop.C# has a number of ways to iterate over a collection of things, and a base interface that lets you...
View ArticleThree on climate change
Earlier this week, the Post reported on data that one of the scariest predictions of anthropogenic climate change theory seems to be coming true:The new research, based on ocean measurements off the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
X is for XML vs. JSON
Welcome to the antepenultimate day (i.e., the 24th) of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge.Today we'll look at how communicating between foreign systems has evolved over time, leaving us with two principal...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Y is for Y2K (and other date/time problems)
I should have posted day 25 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. yesterday, but life happened, as it has a lot this month. I'm looking forward to June when I might not have the over-scheduling I've...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Z is for Zero
Today is the last day of the 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today's topic: Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Null.The concept of "zero" only made it into Western mathematics just a few centuries ago, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
List of 2018 A-to-Z topics
Here's the complete list of topics in the Daily Parker's 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the theme "Programming in C#":A is for Assembly (April 1)B is for BASIC (April 2)C is for Common Language...
View ArticleClik here to view.
6,000
This month will see two important Daily Parker milestones. This is the first one: the 6,000th post since braverman.org launched as a pure blog in November 2005. The 5,000th post was back in March 2016,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It was 20 years ago today
On 13 May 1998, just past midnight New York time, I posted my first joke on my brand-new braverman.org website from my apartment in Brooklyn.My first website of any kind was a page of links I...
View ArticleSleep in on the weekends if you can
A Swedish psychologist has preliminary data that suggest sleeping in on the weekends can make up for some sleep loss during the week, maybe:Sleeping in on a day off feels marvelous, especially for...
View ArticleChicago coyotes: how are they thriving?
Darryl Fears, writing for the Washington Post today, highlights a new study that explains why coyotes have adapted so well to human environments:As mountain lions and wolf packs disappeared from the...
View ArticleRaching out all weekend
The Apollo Chorus is joining Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this weekend in two performances of Rachmaninov's The Bells. Thus, no real blog post today.But if you're in Chicago, swing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Second, third, and fourth looks
Every so often I like to revisit old photos to see if I can improve them. Here's one of my favorites, which I took by the River Arun in Amberley, West Sussex, on 11 June 1992:The photo above is one of...
View ArticleLunchtime reading
Not all of this is as depressing as yesterday's batch:Dana Milbank raises the question, once again, whether President Trump is just a liar or really mentally ill.McCay Coppins describes how...
View ArticleWhy no one answers the phone anymore
Alexis Madrigal, closer to an X-er than a Millennial, rhapsodizes on how the telephone ring, once imperative, now repulses:Before ubiquitous caller ID or even *69 (which allowed you to call back the...
View Article