September 2009 Entries
Read the introductory post here first.
So, you found an open source project you really like, it saves you a lot of time, takes some friction away from your life, saves you money and you’re full of admiration and gratitude to the people who spend their free time working on it, so that you can stand on their shoulders. You feel like you really should give back to them, or to the (rest of the) community around the project, but you don’t really want or can do the obvious – start fixing bugs or implementing new features, so you don’t. But...
Once in a while I talk to someone who sais something like this: “I love open source, especially project X – I would love to contribute back, but I don’t know how”. There are different variations. “I am not a programmer”, “I don’t understand the code – it’s so vast”, “I wouldn’t know how to submit these patch-things they ask for” etc. To help these people I decided to create a small (seriously – 3 posts, excluding this one) series about contributing to open source projects. I hope this will help more people get involved as they realize how...
C# 4.0 is just round the corner and along with it set of nice new additions to the language, including optional parameters. There’s been some historical resistance to add this feature to the language, but here' it is, and I’m glad it’s coming, or at least I was. In few words, optional parameters, have their default value specified in the signature of the method. You can then skip them when calling method, and the method will be called with their default values. So, what’s the deal? To simplify the current discussion I will refer...