Threading Tips: Never Lock a Value Type. Never Lock "This"

UPDATE: As a commenter pointed out, the original code example did not properly demonstrate the problem with locking on the this keyword within a normal method. I have corrected this example and wrote a better example that demonstrates that this problem still exists even in a “normal” method.

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RSS Bandit v1.3.0.29 Released

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This is a bug fix release. Check out Dare’s list of fixes to find out more.

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Beware of @@Identity Theft in SQL Server

sql suggest edit

In T-SQL, you can use the @@IDENTITY keyword to obtain the value of the identity column when you insert a new record. For example, the following query inserts a record into an imaginary table and returns a result set containing the ID of the inserted column.

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Family Guy Uncancelled. Long Live Stewie!

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Stewie This is old news, but I am so glad that the Family Guy is “uncancelled”. It truly is of “The Simpsons” caliber of humor.

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AddressInfo.cs: Converting State Codes to State Names and Vice Versa

code suggest edit

I’m feeling a little uninspired to write anything interesting because my hands are hurting from the keyboard pounding I’ve been doing. Instead, I thought I’d dig up this really simple (and hopefully useful) AddressInfo class for you. The code is extremely basic, but it might save you the hassle of typing all fifty states (and some territories and the District of Columbia) and their two letter postal codes into your own class because I did it for you! Free of charge!

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Putting My Resume Online

meta personal suggest edit

UPDATE: 2014/05/13 I lost it when I migrated it and honestly i don’t feel the need to have it up at the moment.

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My Brother Visited Last Week

personal suggest edit

Brian had some sort of conference to attend, so I didn’t get to see much of him. But last Thursday he was at Venice Beach so I took a break from my work and drove out there. Soon enough, we got to doing that which all brothers must do when they haven’t seen each other in a while.

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Writing For Magazines. Suggestions?

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For some reason, I’ve always wanted to write a book. It started off as a desire to write the next Lord of the Rings classic, but has morphed into writing a reasonably useful technical book.

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Slight Redesign of Haacked.com

meta suggest edit

So I spent a bit of time today to “refresh” the look of my site. On the face of it, it’s not a dramatic change, but under the hood, I tore out the table driven layout and replaced it with a CSS driven layout.

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CSS Question: Two Backgrounds on the Same Element?

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As part of my site’s redesign, I wanted to keep the drop shadow effect on the left and right borders of my main content area. No problem I naively thought, I’ll simply add two background elements to the main div. I named the div “background” like so:

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COOL! Google Maps Overlays Satellite Photographs

tech suggest edit

In case you wanted to see my neighborhood, you can check out this photograph. Then take your mouse and drag it around to see the surrounding area.

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Yeahronimo Releases a Commodore Tablet PC

gadgets suggest edit

Yeahronimo, which owns the rights to the Commodore brand announced that they are nearing the release of a Commodore tablet PC called the Commodore 256, simply because that’s twice the number of the last Commodore 128.

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Reporting Back With 2GB RAM

gadgets suggest edit

Ok, I’m in nerdvana. I got my 2 x 1GB PC 3200 DDR 400 cards today and my machine is noticeably snappier today. On a lark, I decided to open every application on my machine just for kicks. Ok, maybe not. But doing DotNetNuke development is no longer a pain for me.

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Microsoft Develops New MS Phone

Visual Studio.NET New Project Template Folders

visualstudio suggest edit

I’m sure you’re constantly asking yourself this, because I certainly wake up every morning in a cold sweat wondering. When you add a new project in Visual Studio.NET 2003 (friends call her VS.NET), you get the following dialog

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They're Hiring

work suggest edit

I will neither confirm nor deny that this is where I used to work before going independent. I’ll only say that they’ll be doing some interesting work with .NET and it’s worth checking out.

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Putting a Crimp in the RSS Fire Hose

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fire hose In my post entitled Drinking From an RSS Fire Hose I dealt with some of the issues surrounding the flood of incoming RSS entries within an RSS aggregator raised by Dare’s post “Nightcrawler Thoughts: Thums Up, Thumbs Down and Attention.xml”.

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Online Gamer Stabbed - A Case for a Virtual Police Force and Courts?

news tech suggest edit

Did you read about the Chinese online gamer who stabbed a competitor after the competitor sold his borrowed virtual sword?

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Now I've Seen It All. Harmonica Beat Boxer

humor suggest edit

This guy isn’t half bad.

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Rant: Beware of Misleading Credit Card Offers

security suggest edit

Forgive me, but I really need to rant about shitty customer service. I’ve been burned bad by misinformation from ignorant and/or misleading reps. This time however, it involves our credit card company, Bank of America.

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