Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

Last time, we saw how those extra bits can be used to multiplex HANDLE with other values. That was a specific case of a more general scenario: Expanding the handle namespace to include things that aren't handles. (You can also view today's example as a generalization of the sentinel value problem, where we need to generate an arbitrary number of...

Last time, we saw how those extra bits can be used to develop safe sentinel values. That is a special case of a more general problem: How do you pack 33 bits of information into a 32-bit value? Whereas last time, we weren't forced into the use of a sentinel value because we could develop a (cumbersome) helper class and switch people over to ...

Kernel handles are always a multiple of four; the bottom two bits are available for applications to use. But why would an application need those bits anyway? The short answer is extending the handle namespace. The long answer will take a few days to play out. (This series was written in response to Igor Levicki being unable to imagine "how thi...

You can breathe a sigh of relief. Our long national nightmare is over: this is the end of CLR Week 2008. We wind down with a look back at iterators. Michael Entin points out that you can use C# iterators to make asynchronous code easier to write. You can use C# iterators for more than simply iterating. The automatic conversion of...

I mentioned that there was an exception to the general statement that the conversion of an iterator into traditional C# code is something you could have done yourself. That's true, and it was also a pun, because the exception is exception handling. If you have a try ... finally block in your iterator, the language executes the finally block und...

Now that you have the basic idea behind iterators under your belt, you can already answer some questions on iterator usage. Here's a scenario based on actual events: I have an iterator that is rather long and complicated, so I'd like to refactor it. For illustrative purposes, let's say that the enumerator counts from 1 to 100 twice. (In real l...

Like anonymous methods, iterators in C# are very complex syntactic sugar. You could do it all yourself (after all, you did have to do it all yourself in earlier versions of C#), but the compiler transformation makes for much greater convenience. The idea behind iterators is that they take a function with yield return statements (and possible s...

As is customary, the first day of CLR Week is a warm-up. Actually, today's question is a BCL question, not a CLR question, but only the nitpickers will bother to notice. Can somebody explain why StreamReader can’t read apostrophes? I have a text file, and I read from it the way you would expect: StreamReader sr = new StreamReader("myfil...

Welcome to CLR Week 2008. I'm going to mix it up and start with a link listing. Other CLR topics:

If you return from , will you get a ? Yes. No. ... Yes. All three answers are correct, for different formulations of the question. From the kernel's point of view, the answer is a simple Yes. If a DLL's entry point returns to the notification, it will receive a notification. However, most C and C++ programs do not use the ra...