I spent a bit of my college days in *nix land. Much of that time was spent writing and maintaining scripts for my various shell accounts. After I switched to primarily developing on Windows, I was frustrated by the Windows CMD shell and eventually lost interest in scripting.
COM interop is one of the messy places where error by return value vs exception meet head on. COM was built on the basis of HRESULT return values while .NET tends to use exceptions. To compensate for that, the CLR helps out by mapping failure HRESULTs into .NET exceptions during COM Interop. It does this by the following process
It’s important in multi threaded programs to understand the difference between an assigment operation and Interlocked.Exchange when you are dealing with shared references (memory).
It’s very important to read the documentation of this method before actually using it. A common misunderstanding of this method is that it will throw if the path does not exist. If Path.GetFullPath() discovers that the directory does exists it will make sure the user has access to the path. In the abscence of a directory it will skip the check and just return the canonicalized path.
