Recently I made a very large update to our code base. Our code base lacked a standard way of guarding entry and exit points into the various components. Having said guards is useful for error handling, tracing, reducing redundancy, etc … The edit standardized our entry points by adding start/end macros to our entry point functions. In addition to other house keeping, the macros also created an HRESULT variable named “hr”. Example below.

I was reading a post on Coding Horror the other day about programming books and how developers don’t read enough of them.?? I readily agree with the first two points in the article that 1) most programming books suck and 2) books are sold by weight not by volume. Reading is an integral part of a developers life. Blogs are a great source of info but books are a necessity as well.

I often post code examples, samples and snippets on this blog. Many of these samples are a part of a utility library I’ve been writing and maintaining for many years now. Essentially since I got involved in DotNet programming.

Many developers want to implement equality functions for their objects. DotNet made equality a deep part of the framework and added support all the way up to System.Object with Equals and GetHashCode.’? In addition to the strongly enforced method semantics of GetHashCode and Equals there are also several other hard to enforce patterns that developers must follow in order to properly integrate into the rest of the DotNet framework. We’ll explore those rules today.

Recently we had a good discussion on an internal alias about the use of Me, MyClass and MyBase in VB. Me, MyBase and MyClass are all ways to access instance member data in a VB class or structure. There was a little bit of confusion on the actual workings and meanings of the keywords in various contexts and I want to use this post to shed light on the different meanings.