A while ago Ian Griffiths wrote about an improvement to his TimedLock class in which he changed it from a class to a struct. This change resulted in a value type that implements IDisposable. I had a nagging question in the back of my mind at the time that I quickly forgot about. The question is wouldn’t instances of that type get boxed when calling Dispose?

Today I was thinking about how much I enjoy doing business with a particular company and realized my natural inclination was not to blog about it. Yet when a company really drops the ball, I have no problem airing my criticisms. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to be around people who are only critical and never offer praise. It gets to be tiresome.

UPDATE: For a more full featured implementation of this pattern for ASP.NET Web Forms, check out the WebForms MVP project! It’s available as a NuGet package! Install-Package WebFormsMVP

I knew this question would come up, so I figure I would address it in its own blog post. Mike asks a great question about my MVP implementation (actually he asks two).

A while ago I wrote that you should never lock a value type and never lock this. I presented a code snippet to illustrate the point but I violated the cardinal rule for code examples: compile and test it in context. Mea Culpa! Today in my comments, someone named Jack rightly pointed out that my example doesn’t demonstrate a deadlock due to locking this. As he points out, if the code were in a Finalizer, then my example would be believable.

Recently I wrote that I could not seem to get Log4Net to work with an external configuration file while running ASP.NET 2.0 in Medium Trust. It turns out that I should have been more explicit. I could not get Subtext to work with Log4Net in Medium Trust, but it had nothing to do with Medium Trust. Mea culpa!

In response to my blog post on ViewState backed properties and the Null Coalescing operator, Scott Watermasysk expresses a worry that the null coalescing operator opens one up to a race condition in the comments of his blog post.

This might be almost too obvious for many of you, but I thought I’d share it anyways. Back in the day, this was the typical code I would write for a value type property of an ASP.NET Control that was backed by the ViewState.

Tonight I attended our local Los Angeles .NET Developers Group meeting for the first time in years. I pretty much never go to these meetings because I just haven’t found them worth dealing with the congestion of rush hour traffic in the UCLA area, which is really bad. Of course I should probably view user group meetings in the same way Jeff Atwood views conferences - I am not there for the talks, I am there to meet you.

I submitted my first patch to the Log4Net project today. The patch enables the AdoNetAppender to get its connection string from the ConnectionStrings section of a web.config file. Hopefully it gets accepted and applied.

I am a little late in reporting this, but I hadn’t realized the problem until I had to maintain an older project that used Log4Net 1.2.8. I upgraded it to log4net 1.2.10 and noticed it stopped working. I then found this comment in the log4net mailing list archives.

This story from Boing Boing just cracks me up. Apparently monkeys have been harassing passengers of India’s Delhi Metro. This has become such a problem that they have had to hire some langurs (a fierce looking primate) along with a langur wrangler to scare away the monkeys. Here is a description of one such incident.

If you read this blog outside of an aggregator, you might notice a few minor new tweaks. I am dogfooding Subtext 1.9 which runs on ASP.NET 2.0. We are very close to preparing a release, so I figured I would beta test this one on my own blog and see if everything works well.

Jeff “The CodingHorror” Atwood takes issue with the idea that software developers have any moral obligation to contribute to Open Source projects. And you know what? I agree. However I do take issue with his conclusion as well as some of the points that he makes in an attempt to bolster his argument.

One thing I love about my soccer league is that they have a kick butt website. The design isn’t much to look at, but the site is chock full of useful information both current and historical.

In a triumphant return after about three months of not blogging, Barry “idunno.org” Dorrans has published an HttpModule for modifying custom HTTP headers in response to a throw away comment by Scott Hanselman in his post on P3P requests.

UPDATE: I long ago stopped supporting Captain Hook. This is a dead project.

Update Corrected my pop-culture iconography mix up.

UPDATE: Sorry, but this site appears to be down now. I’ll try to find the tools and upload them elsewhere.

This is just too funny not to link to. Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, had an epiphany recently which led him to solve the problems in the Middle East.