One of the seldom used, and often unknown, features of VB extension methods is that the argument of the extension method (the first parameter) can be passed by reference. This gives extension methods the power to change the reference that was used to invoke the value!

When developing my immutable collections library, I spent a lot of time on usability. After all, if a library is not useful then what’s the point?

In my projects with F#, I often find that I know exactly what type of sequence transformation I want to run, yet I spend all of my time trying to find it!!! The problem is I’m used to query comprehensions in LINQ terminology. Select, Where and SelectMany are so ingrained into my programming they are practically done through muscle memory.

I constantly get tripped up in my powershell scripts/commands because I run them against a binary file. In particular when I’m searching through a directory structure looking for a particular string or regex. I’ve found the simplest way to avoid this problem is to use a simple regex check to filter out the known binary files.

Is it better to be wrong once or to be right then think you’re wrong but find out you were right but wrong about being wrong? Besides the obvious be right the first time, it’s certainly an educational experience.