February 24th, 2010
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Desktop Development, Web Development
(.NET, C#, Tips and Tricks)
One little quirk of C#, which has pretty much become a defining characteristic of the language, is the default parameters system, or lack thereof.
If you want to have a default set of arguments for a function or constructor then you have to create several overloaded versions of the function for each possible set of parameter that you want to be able to accept.
This will no longer be the case in C# 4.0 with the addition of optional parameters and named parameters features. This is one little change I am really looking forward to in a big way.
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January 23rd, 2010
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Desktop Development
(.NET, C#, How-To, Windows)
If you’re writing a .NET desktop application that you intend to distribute then you may find it very helpful to build a system for reporting any exceptions that end-users experience back to you. Being able to gather raw exception reports from an app somewhere in the wild will make it much easier to find problems that never appeared on your development and testing environments.
This can save you a lot of headaches when dealing with users complaining about problems that you simply cannot reproduce. An error reporting system has the added benefit of improving end-user morale. It makes people feel much better when they know the developer has received a real report about the problem they encountered.
My method for handling exceptions and reporting them is very simple. However, it does require a little extra work to setup. I’ll walk you through my particular method and give you the basic C# code that I use.
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