This is more of a quick, explanatory “heads-up” post than anything else. On March 31st 2018, I started an experiment: I created a new Stack Overflow user called “Daisy Shipton” with no picture and a profile that just read “Love coding in C#” (or similar). I wanted to see how a new user presenting with … Continue reading Farewell, Daisy Shipton →

This blog post is effectively a log of my experience with the preview of the C# 8 nullable reference types feature. There are lots of caveats here: it’s mostly “as I go along” so there may well be backtracking. I’m not advising the right thing to do, as I’m still investigating that myself. And of … Continue reading First steps with nullable reference types →

I started writing a blog post about versioning in July 2017. I’ve mostly abandoned it, because I think the topic is too vast for a single post. It potentially needs a whole site/wiki/repository devoted to it. I hope to come back to it at some point, because I believe this is a hugely important topic … Continue reading Backward compatibility and overloading →

This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow. However, it’s been a long time coming. A while ago I started writing a similar post, but it got longer and longer without coming to any conclusion. I’m writing this one … Continue reading Stack Overflow Culture →

Background There are three things you need to know to start with: Operations on read-only variables which are value types copy the variable value first. I’ve written about this before on this blog. C# 7.2 addresses this by introducing the readonly modifier for structs. See the language proposal for more details. I was touched to … Continue reading Implementing IXmlSerializable in readonly structs →