"If you are designing a piece of tech gear - be it hardware or software - and you need to choose an arbitrary limit or range for something, make sure the limit is either 2^n or 2^n - 1."

Source: Eric Gunnerson

Frank just started his new blog and his first post details how to work with control adapters in SPS2007. Very good stuff.

It seems VS 2003 has been out forever, but sp1 has been released for download yesterday. I never experieced any real problems with it, but it's great to see the DDCPX team is still working on improving its stability.

Download here: VS 2003 SP1 and release notes

List of Fixes: KB 918007

Well, maybe...

public class GenericComparer : IComparer {

public GenericComparer( CompareDelegate doCompare ){

if( doCompare == null ){

throw new ArgumentNullException("doCompare");

this.doCompare = doCompare;

public int Compare( object x, object y ){

if( x == null ){

if( y == null ){

return 0;

return -1;

if( y == null ){

return 1;

return doCompare(x,y);

private CompareDelegate doCompare;

public delegate int CompareDelegate( object x, object y );

Update:
My colleague Branimir did a little experimentation and found this implementation is similar in performance to a 'regular' methodcall when sorting around 10.000 items.

See also: A horrible way to calculate a squareroot

using System;
using System.Query;

namespace SquareRoot
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
int input = 16;
decimal margin = 0.01M;

Func<decimal, decimal> abs = (decimal x) =>
x < 0 ? -x : x;

Func<decimal, bool> goodEnough = (decimal guess) =>
abs(guess * guess - input) < margin;

Func<decimal, decimal> newGuess = (decimal guess) =>
(guess + input / guess) / 2;

Console.WriteLine( "Guess {0}", Try(1, goodEnough, newGuess) );
Console.ReadLine();
}

static decimal Try(decimal guess, Func<decimal, bool> goodEnough, Func<decimal, decimal> newGuess)
{
if (!goodEnough(guess))
{
return Try(newGuess(guess), goodEnough, newGuess);
}

return guess;
}
}
}

But fun to write:

using System;

class MyClass {
public static void Main() {

int input = 16;
decimal margin = 0.01M;

Func<decimal, decimal> abs = delegate(decimal x) {
return x < 0 ? -x : x;
};

Func<decimal, bool> goodEnough = delegate(decimal guess) {

return abs(guess * guess - input) < margin;
};

Func<decimal, decimal> newGuess = delegate(decimal guess) {
return (guess + input / guess) / 2;
};

Console.WriteLine("guess {0}", Try(1, goodEnough, newGuess) );
Console.ReadLine();
}

static decimal Try(decimal guess, Func<decimal, bool> goodEnough, Func<decimal, decimal> newGuess) {

if (!goodEnough(guess)) {
return Try(newGuess(guess), goodEnough, newGuess);
}

return guess;
}


delegate ReturnType Func<U, ReturnType>(U guess);
}

Inspired by Joel and Chris.

The lowest level useful description of the goal of any software is probably best put as "elicit a positive emotional response
in a human".

2005 – DJ Mort

My highlights of the PDC 05:

• Linq and the associated C# 3.0 features
• IIS 7.0, plugable modules and xcopy deployment of configurations.
• Windows Workflow Foundation

Expect more indepth articles in the coming weeks, when I’ve had some time to experiment with everything.

public static string HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(
   string password,
   string passwordFormat
);

In the FormsAuthentication class in the System.Web.Security namespace.

The first parameter is the string you want hashed, the second is the hashalgorithm, “sha1” or “md5”, to use.

[more info on msdn]