A question that arose in response to my previous post (about how string comparisons can produce unexpected results when done in a culture-sensitive way) was Which is right, StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.InvariantCulture? The short answer: StringComparison.Ordinal.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got a defect from QA today saying that our product was unable to track files in paths containing Unicode characters. I’ll admit that I was skeptical. I had just tried that myself the other day and it worked perfectly. Trying it again today also worked perfectly, but the QA engineer showed me otherwise.

Read the rest of this entry »

The System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker class makes it easy to code a long running operation with the ability to provide progress, cancellation, and notification of completion. It is particularly nice for UI because while the long running operation executes on a thread pool thread, notifications of progress and completion are marshalled back to the “main” thread. (When I say “main” thread, I mean the one on which BackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync() is called.)

Read the rest of this entry »