Tony Sneed's Blog

I think THE person at the top of the technical heroes list has got to be Anders Hejlsberg.

That sentence might seem so obvious it’s not worth stating. True, he is the chief designer and architect of the C# language. But that’s not really why I place him at the top of the list. He is the ultimate software legend (even outshining members of Microsoft’s now defunct “software legends” program). But I suppose, if I had to capture what makes him so great, the word that would come to mind is “wisdom.”

I just ran across a fabulous hour-long retrospective interview of Anders on Channel 9: Life and Times of Anders Hejlsberg. The show, “Behind the Code,” included pointed questions (what about J++?), a walk down memory lane, and an autographed rendition of his favorite data structure. I was absolutely riveted and, like those in the audience, in a state of semi-adoration.

One of my favorite new features in Visual Studio 2005 is the code snippets technology. Let’s face it. One of the reasons some of us (the names will not be given in order to protect the guilty), used fields instead of properties in our classes because we just didn’t want to type those extra lines of code. I used to use a product called Code Rush with Visual Studio 2003, but it seemed like a lot to learn and sort of seem to get in the way at times.

Visual Studio 2005 comes with a neat feature called “code snippets,” which fills in a section of code for you and lets you modify certain fields by just tabbing through and typing. Take, for example, a foreach loop. When you type foreach in the code editor, you’ll notice a foreach item in the intellisense drop down.

Those are great interview questions. Every developer should know how to answer them, because you can’t write code correctly without understanding the Stack and the Heap, what they do, and how they interrelate.

Am I going to explain it here? I could, but I found a terrific exposition on it. So I’ll just point you there.

C# Heap(ing) Vs Stack(ing) in .NET: Part 1
C# Heap(ing) Vs Stack(ing) in .NET: Part 2
C# Heap(ing) Vs Stack(ing) in .NET: Part 3
C# Heap(ing) Vs Stack(ing) in .NET: Part 4

As you probably already know, using directives can save you a lot of typing. Consider the following:

System.Collections.Specialized. NameValueCollection col = new System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection();

By inserting this using directive,

using System.Collections.Specialized;

you can cut it down to this:

NameValueCollection col = new NameValueCollection();

Using “using” to Alias Namespaces

But that’s not all there is to using “using” (pun intended). With using, you can alias both namespaces and types, which is great for distinguishing between two classes with the same name in different namespaces. Say, for example, you have your own Console class, defined within your own namespace:

There are two parts to this story. The first part is deals with how to interact with the Visual Studio development environment programmatically, in order to add a tab to the toolbox and place components on it. That can be accomplished within the confines of a simple Console application. However, in a real-world scenario, you’d want to install your custom components by means of a Setup project with an MSI file, which first installs the components into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). That’s what the second part of the story is all about: creating a setup and deployment project that first installs the components into the GAC and then uses a custom action with an installer class to create the toolbox tab and place the components onto the tab.