Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2010 in 24 Hours
I have previously mentioned that I’m wo

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for MSDN subscribers, and generally available on October 21. I haven’t had a chance yet to play around with it, but some of the CLR changes that are very exciting to hear about are: The new String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method indicates whether a string is null, empty, or consists only of white-space characters. New overloads have been added to the

Interesting .NET Framework Statistics
I’ve been very “heads down” working on my upcoming book from Sams Publishing, Teach Yourself C# 2010 in 24 Hours, so I haven’t been blogging as much as I usually do. In doing some research for the book, I’ve been taking an in-depth look at the .NET Framework and thought I would share some interesting statistics. There are 18,435 total types in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, with 13,995 classes, 1,216 interfaces, 2,100 enums, and 1,124 structs. The complete breakdown is shown below.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve heard that quote. It’s a great quote said by one of the leading minds in computer programming and formal mathematics, Donald Knuth. The problem with this quote is that, like so many other things, people have only remembered (or only quote) a small portion of the entire thing. To read the full quote, you need to look at a paper published in December 1974 titled Structured Programming with go to Statements in Computing Surveys. The full quote is this (in reference to a loop optimization technique that provides a 12% performance improvement):