With the upcoming version 6 of C#, there’s a lot of talk on CodePlex and elsewhere about string interpolation. Not very surprising, since it’s one of the major features of that release… In case you were living under a rock during the last few months and you haven’t heard about it, string interpolation is a way to insert C# expressions inside a string, so that they’re evaluated at runtime and replaced with their values.

Asynchrony in C# 5 is awesome, and I’ve been using it a lot since it was introduced. But there are few annoying limitations; for instance, you cannot pass parameters by reference (ref or out) to an asynchronous method. There are good reasons for that; the most obvious is that if you pass a local variable by reference, it is stored on the stack, but the current stack won’t remain available during the whole execution of the async method (only until the first await), so the location of the variable won’t exist anymore.

When unit testing a method, one of the things to test is argument validation : for instance, ensure that the method throws a ArgumentNullException when a null argument is passed for a parameter that isn’t allowed to be null. Writing this kind of test is very easy, but it’s also a tedious and repetitive task, especially if the method has many parameters… So I wrote a method that automates part of this task: it tries to pass null for each of the specified arguments, and asserts that the method throws an ArgumentNullException.

I recently started using Visual Studio Online for personal projects, and I must say it’s a pretty good platform, although it would be nice to be able to host public projects as well as private ones. The thing I like the most is the integration with Visual Studio Team Explorer to manage work items and builds. However, I noticed a little gotcha when using Git for source control : the remote for VS Online must be named origin, otherwise Team Explorer won’t detect that it’s a VS Online project, and it won’t show the “Builds” and “Work items” pages.

I’ve been hearing quite a lot about NDepend over the last few years, but I had never tried it until recently, when its creator Patrick Smacchia was kind enough to offer me a license. NDepend is a static analysis tool for .NET that checks your code base against a large set of rules that fall in various categories, such as code quality, object-oriented design, architecture, naming conventions, etc. All of these rules are completely customizable.

A common requirement for desktop applications is to handle system-wide hotkeys, in order to intercept keyboard shortcuts even when they don’t have focus. Unfortunately, there is no built-in feature in the .NET framework to do it. Of course, this is not a new issue, and there are quite a few open-source libraries that address it (e.g. VirtualInput). Most of them rely on a global system hook, which allow them to intercept all keystrokes, even the ones you’re not interested in.

If you ever had to upload large volumes of data over HTTP, you probably ran into timeout issues. The default Timeout value for HttpWebRequest is 100 seconds, which means that if it takes more than that from the time you send the request headers to the time you receive the response headers, your request will fail. Obviously, if you’re uploading a large file, you need to increase that timeout… but to which value?

If you have used the HttpWebRequest class to upload data, you know that it uses a “push” model. What I mean is that you call the GetRequestStream method, which opens the connection if necessary, sends the headers, and returns a stream on which you can write directly. .NET 4.5 introduced the HttpClient class as a new way to communicate over HTTP. It actually relies on HttpWebRequest under the hood, but offers a more convenient and fully asynchronous API.

As you probably know, the standard way to select or deselect an item in a WinRT list control is to slide it up or down a little. Although I rather like this gesture, it’s not very intuitive for users unfamiliar with Modern UI. And it gets even more confusing, because my previous statement wasn’t perfectly accurate: in fact, you have to slide the item perpendicularly to the panning direction. In a GridView, which (by default) pans horizontally, that means up or down; but in a ListView, which pans vertically, you have to slide the item left or right.

As far as I can remember, Visual Studio always had something called “custom tools”, also known as single-file generators. When you apply such a tool to a file in your project, it will generate something (typically code, but not necessarily) based on the content of the file. For instance, the default custom tool for resource files is called ResXFileCodeGenerator, and generates a class that provides easy access to the resources defined in the resx file.