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Latest Posts

  • Can self-taught programmers make it?

    Published on 19 Nov 2023 18 minute read

    The short answer is, “yes,” but the long answer is complicated. On one hand, no formal education can create an uphill battle. On the other hand, all good programmers are self taught.

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  • An Overdue Update for the Sixth Edition

    Published on 29 Oct 2023 6 minute read

    I had hoped to get the sixth edition out in conjunction with the release of C# 12 and .NET 8 in November, but the sixth edition won’t be ready until December or into 2024.

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  • WinForms Book Recommendations

    Published on 01 Dec 2022 5 minute read

    I frequently get asked, “What book is like yours that could help me with X. In this post, I’ll answer that question where X is WinForms.”

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  • Counting in Other Bases

    Published on 13 Oct 2022 7 minute read

    A discussion in how to work in other bases besides the common base-10 decimal system. This serves as a foundation for some interesting conversations around how the integer types store values in binary.

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  • Handling Bad Inputs Early in the Book

    Published on 11 Jun 2022 11 minute read

    I get a lot of questions in the book about how to handle bad user input. Situations like a user typing in letters when numbers were expected, etc. I’m planning on doing some revising for future editions to address this more directly. This post is my current thinking on how this might be done in the 6th Edition. TL;DR: Early in the book, we don’t have good tools for validating input. It is just fine (and expected) to just handle the “happy path” and not worry too much about bad inputs until you learn more tools throughout the book.

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  • Parsing Enumerations

    Published on 22 May 2022 20 minute read

    The book discusses enumerations in depth, but this post is some supplemental information about converting to and from strings to let a human pick one of the various enumeration options.

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  • More On Value And Reference Types

    Published on 23 Apr 2022 12 minute read

    I sometimes hear people say, “Value types get stored on the stack and reference types get stored on the heap.” That’s a common misconception. There’s a bit of reason behind it, but reality is quite a bit more complex than that.

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  • A Range Hack

    Published on 09 Apr 2022 5 minute read

    A little hack to make foreach (int number in 1..10) work in C#.

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  • How to Ask Questions

    Published on 02 Apr 2022 12 minute read

    Covers some guidelines and suggestions to get the most when asking a question in the Discord server. These guidelines also generally apply to asking technical questions anywhere on the web.

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  • The 4th Edition Upgrade Companion is now available.

    Published on 12 Nov 2021 1 minute read

    The Upgrade Companion is a document that contains all of the changes between 4th and 5th Editions. It is essentially a “diff” between the two versions, and is a shorthand way to get an updated copy of the C# Player’s Guide, if you’ve got the 4th Edition already.

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  • Plans for early access

    Published on 27 Aug 2020 1 minute read

    An update on where things are currently at, and some thoughts about early access and the release date.

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