Peter Shaw

Last month, we saw the ‘String’ class in the Back to Basics column. A close relative to the ‘String’ class is the ‘StringBuilder’ class, and, as its name suggests, it’s designed mostly for the purpose of constructing large strings. If you’ve been around .NET for some time now, you’ll know there are no end of […]

If you’ve done anything long term in the Web industry, it’s likely that you will have come across “Base64 Encoding” at some point. Base64 is the encryption format used by browsers when implementing very simple username and password form of basic authentication. If you ask anyone these days, however, for a serious point of view […]

Pattern Type: Creational Intent: To separate the creation of complex concrete instance of a given object from its creator allowing the same creation process to create other objects of differing types while maintaining the same creation mechanism. Description The builder pattern provides a (usually static) instance of a class that constantly creates objects of a […]

Last month, we went back to basics with the Int class. This month, we look at the textual equivalent, the string class. The String & Int data types, single-handed, are the two most used data in the .NET platform. Between them, they handle about 90% of all the data we use. Strings are nothing complex; […]

It doesn’t matter what OS you’re using or what language you’re working in, sooner or later you’ll need to find out about, and deal with, the various storage devices (“drives”) available in your system. .NET is no different. I’ve covered the File and Directory classes before in this column, but I’ve not yet mentioned handling […]

Design Patterns: The Prototype Pattern Pattern Type: Creational Description The prototype design pattern seeks to provide a single unitary interface to a single class type, all while allowing the underlying class type to be different. This has a number of uses. For example, the GOF book illustrates the pattern through the use of a “Graphical […]

The humble ‘int’. We take it for granted every day we write software in .NET without even stopping to think what’s behind the scenes. To many developers, it’s just a simple type, but below the covers ‘int’ is actually a type, set in the ‘System’ namespace. Granted, it’s not as large as ‘Math’ or ‘Collections’ […]

Introduction Starting this month, I’m beginning a new set of articles in this column. “Beginning C#” is going to start right at the very beginning and teach C# as a language, right from the ground up. We’ll start with the obligatory hello world example, and work our way up through variables, loops, decisions, structures, objects, […]

Starting next year, I’m hoping to begin a new series of posts in this column that I’m going to call the ‘Back to Basics’ posts. The idea will be that each post will re-visit a common .NET base class and give you a refresher in the methods and features provided by it. I’m going to […]

It never ceases to amaze me the things that you can look up using Yahoo Query Language. I’ve covered YQL in this column before, where I presented a desktop application that plotted searched geographic locations on a Google map. YQL, however, has way more to cover, and even more beyond that if you use an […]

Grava What? Gravatar is a social presence site that specializes in storing a profile and associated avatar for you. Unlike sites such as Facebook, Linked-In, and others, Gravatar doesn’t promote sharing of things. It has one simple goal, and that’s to store avatars and profile information in a central place for you use in other […]