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August 2004 - Posts

I add two new parameterless methods to OrderedSet (and OrderedBag): First() and Last() which return the first (smallest) and last (largest) items in the set. I also added these to the View class that's returned by Range(), RangeFrom(), and RangeTo(). Read More...
I was happy to see that the .NET BCL team agreed to change the KeyValuePair and DictionaryEntry structs to allow null keys . This will allow the PowerCollection dictionary classes to support null keys. In fact, there is a clever work-around that was pointed Read More...
There's a design issue on OrderedBag and OrderedSet that I've been wrestling with in my mind for a while, and I'm not entirely sure what the right approach is. Perhaps by writing it out and getting feedback the best course of action will become a bit Read More...
Comparing strings is subtler than it seemed to me at first glance. I was thinking more about IComparable<T>, IComparer<T>, and related issues, and I started looking at how the string class implements these interfaces. Interestingly, the simple Read More...
By email, I got a suggestion that it would be useful for Algorithms.RemoveWhenTrue to return the removed items. This seemed like a good idea, so I've changed the signature to: ICollection<ItemType> RemoveWhenTrue(ICollection<ItemType> collection, Read More...
Sorry that it has been so long since I've been able to make a post. I have not been completely idle, however, and I have a new drop for your enjoyment. It can be downloaded here . The good news is that I've finally been able to generate decent looking Read More...
Finding a good name sometimes seems so hard. In Power Collections, we are going to want to provide a bunch of static methods that implement useful algorithms on collection interfaces (sort of STL-like). Stuff like “LargestElement“, “Sort“, Read More...
The first code drop for Power Collections is now available here . The ZIP file includes a binary DLL and source code. So far, there is only one usable collection: OrderedDictionary, which I've been blogging about for the past couple of weeks. The code Read More...
I was doing some rough performance comparisons of different calling mechanisms in Beta 1, to see what was fast and what wasn't. I tried looking at interface calls vs. delegate calls, both using generic and not using generic. The results were almost entirely Read More...
On Friday I met with some architects and program managers at Microsoft to update them on how the Power Collections project is going after the first month. Generally, the outlook seemed positive, so I get to keep working! They were very supportive of the Read More...
I'm spending this week in Laramie, Wyoming, competing in the Rocky Mountain 1000-day , which is a week long orienteering competition. I'm having lots of fun, but running up and down hills, cross country through sagebrush, at 8000+ feet really wears you Read More...