I don't know how many times I've put together the same slow regexp to check if the user input is a valid phone number. I decided that this cannot go on and developed a simple phone number primitive. Now our main concern here is the performance of TryParse since it will be used the most. After running some performance tests the median timing was 400ns on a 3Ghz machine.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 are almost released, one of the new things that ship with this release is Parallel Programming. Since you can't buy a machine anymore with just one core it is time that we developers get intimate with concurrent programming. I decided to play around with this a little today, this is not a real technical post, I mostly show you how you can get started and what new tools are available.

Getting to know Parallel Programming with the .NET Framework 4

The best way to learn about new additions to a framework is to look at some code. There are 22 sam...

Are you waiting for .NET 4.0 to take advantage of lazy initialization? Now you don't have to. The question you need to ask yourself is why haven't I already made this myself?

Aren't we all a little lazy?

Update: I added some code to handle DBNulls.

With the upcoming release of .NET 4.0 we will be seeing the new dynamic type introduced. The dynamic type bypasses static type checking and is instead checked at run-time. It was introduced to improve interoperability with dynamic languages like IronPython as well as simplifying the usage COM APIs that return objects such as the Microsoft Office API. How can we take advantage of this in other areas? ADO.NET is a perfect candidate for taking advantage of the dynamic type. The following code lays out the ground work for a n...

I had the need to create a setup that changed my app.config file. In actual fact I wanted to create several setup files which I could then send to the user so that it would install the same program but with a small difference in the app.config file. And I also did not want any user input for this else I could have easily done it with just one setupproject. I don't trust users to enter the correct value.

So I created 2 setup projects. One that doesn't change anything and the other that changes the app.config file.

I found