Book Review: The Pragmatic Programmer
I recently embarked in a on a journey to read (or re-read) all the great classic books in the software literature. The Pragmatic Programmer is one of those books which is usually included in the recommended readings for a software developer, and deservedly so. The book, released in 1999, has been so successful that the two [...]

A Singleton Service Locator Pattern
This is the third post of a series on the Service Locator pattern. In the first post I described how to create a basic service locator for your C# application, while in the second post I introduced lazy initialization of the services. We now add another piece to our puzzle, transforming the Service Locator class into [...]

Making WCF Serializer Work with Circular References
The Problem of Circular References Recently I had to model a tree-like structure using a variation of the GoF composite design pattern and to pass this class to a WCF service for further processing. The class has circular reference as described by the following drawing: Therefore off I went to naively create my DataContract along the following lines: [DataContract(Namespace [...]

Take Action! The Blog Action Day
Today October 15th is the Blog Action Day. If you are concerned about the climate changes that are taking place in our planet (if not, where have you been in the last 30 years?!?) and want to know more about what can be done, take some time to read through some posts at the Blog [...]

Service Locator Pattern in C# with Lazy Initialization
In my previous post Service Locator Pattern in C#: A Simple Example I introduced a fairly basic implementation of this pattern. In this post I will address one of the limitations of that implementation, introducing a form of lazy initialization. Defining Lazy Initialization Lazy initialization improves the performance of object creation, deferring long running initializations until they [...]