void Nish(char* szBlog);

VS 2010 Beta 1 includes some C# 4.0 features and though I have been reading about some of the new stuff on various blogs and forums, I only got to play with it very recently. Put simply, the dynamic keyword allows you to declare and use types that are not type-checked during compilation. They are [...]

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Here’s another tip from an MSDN forum discussion. Someone wanted to know how to flush the keyboard buffer in a C# console application. Here’s a simple hack to do this : private static void FlushKeyboard() { while (Console.In.Peek() != -1) Console.In.Read(); } Now you can use it as follows : char x = (char)Console.Read(); FlushKeyboard(); [...]

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Last week I attended the 2009 MVP Summit held at Redmond/Seattle and I’ve got to say that I had two rather peculiar experiences whilst there. The first incident was on the way to Seattle – it snowed in Atlanta of all things to happen and this resulted in dozens of cancelled and delayed flights. My [...]

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In my previous blog entry, I had recommended storing enums using their string representations when writing them to a database. There’s a caveat there though – the enum names should be guaranteed to remain stable, because if you change the name of an enum member, it breaks the database. For my specific scenario I ended [...]

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Okay I’ve been called many things in my life, but this was a first for sure. My wife ordered pizza and I went to pick it up on my way home from work. She gave my name as Nish, and she spelled out the first letter as “N for Neptune”. I’ve heard her use “S [...]

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I am a bit fixated on how people spell my name – for those of you who don’t know, it’s “Nishant” – 7 unrepeated letters that even a 4-year old should find it trivial to remember. Unfortunately enough, many Indian names that end in “nt” are sometimes pronounced and spelled as “nth”, so there’s a [...]

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Smitha and I were shopping at Target this past weekend, and as is the norm these days I was pushing little Rohan around in his stroller while Smitha went through the aisles picking, unpicking and then re-picking various items that seized her interest. I was mostly bored and lost in my thoughts when I was [...]

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I’ve had some very interesting experiences when calling customer support, but last week a call to Comcast resulted in a whole new experience for me. After being on hold for about 5 minutes, listening to some of the most awful music you could possibly round up, a girl picks up. She greets me and then [...]

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The CEO of my first company (who was an old time assembler/C programmer even before I was born) liked to periodically quote, “you either get pointers or you don’t”. I believe I’ve seen variants of that on the web – but I just did some Googling and could not find out who made the original [...]

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I started an installation of Visual studio Orcas beta 1 last night just before I went to sleep and also set the alarm for 3 AM so I could wake up and hit [Next] when it prompts me to install the documentation. Well guess what? I woke up and found that Vista had rebooted and [...]

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It’s been quite a while since I blogged – I am not sure why though. There are various topics I meant to blog about but never got around to doing it. Anyway this morning I updated my website (www.voidnish.com) to ASP.NET 2. Of course, there’s not going to be any speed difference or anything like [...]

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WPF guru and fellow-CPian Josh Smith has very kindly sent me a {Josh Smith on WPF} t-shirt which is part of the prize package for his WPF Challenge programming contest. Here’s a photo of me wearing this really cool t-shirt :- Nish wearing the {Josh Smith on WPF} t-shirt Obviously, you are gonna want this [...]

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This is the 3rd (and most likely the last) chapter excerpt that’s published on The Code Project C++/CLI in Action – Using interior and pinning pointers I am quite excited about the fact that the book will be out this month :nerd:

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A second chapter excerpt from my book C++/CLI in Action has been published on The Code Project. There’s one more coming up (later this week). C++/CLI in Action – Instantiating CLI classes I also have an update as to when the printed book will be available. The book’s going into printing phase in a week, [...]

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While Firefox has had plugins to block IntelliTXT popup-ads for ages, Internet Explorer never really had one that worked well enough to be used consistently. And today, I was horrified to find that a few websites actually had IntelliTXT popups that showed videos! Just when you thought IntelliTXT couldn’t get any more nauseating, you get [...]

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A chapter excerpt from my book C++/CLI in Action has been published on The Code Project. C++/CLI in Action – Declaring CLR types A couple more will be published soon (hopefully this week).

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I got tagged by Kenny Kerr on Jan 3rd and by Kate Gregory on Jan 7th. I had to do some Googling to figure out what tagging is all about. Some people don’t seem to like this whole tagging concept as they feel it resembles chain mail. So if any of you are in that [...]

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I was reading Raymond Chen’s blog earlier today when I came across an entry where he talks about the ASCII character 7 which emits a beep on the command prompt. That brought back memories of one of the first programs I ever wrote on a computer. It was 1989 and some of us from Class [...]

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Today I bought the Logitech X-540 computer speakers from Best Buy. The sales guy tried to dump a Best Buy reward zone credit card on me, and his sales girl friend tried to convince me to buy a 2 year service warranty which would make me eligible for a free replacement for up to 2 [...]

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Last week, we relocated from Toronto to Marietta, a suburb town of Atlanta. It was a 15 hour drive that we split into two days; we took a sleep-break in Lexington, Kentucky. The drive was mostly uneventful, though we drove through some of the most scenic and beautiful highways you could think of. Mid-October is [...]

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