Understanding equality and object comparison in .NET framework

.NET framework provides several methods to do comparison and equality check for objects. It can be pretty confusing at the beginning by looking at the documentations for each interfaces that framework offers. In this post, I will try explain the possibilities with examples.

Basically, there are two kinds of equality in .NET. Reference Equality and Value Equality. Default is reference equality. To understand reference equality, consider the following class:

Thought process for writing recursive methods

I was interviewing one candidate the other day and found that he is facing difficulties in writing a recursive method. This is not the first time I am seeing people facing problems with recursion. In this post, I will try to explain the thought process to write recursive methods.

This post is intended for beginners who don’t have any idea about recursion. If you are an intermediate or above level, you don’t find this as useful.

Single click builds for different environments using Visual Studio

A neat build system is vital for all projects. Good build system should be capable to work without *any* user intervention. Here is what Joel Spolsky says on his post

Can you make a build in one step?

By this I mean: how many steps does it take to make a shipping build from the latest source snapshot? On good teams, there’s a single script you can run that does a full checkout from scratch, rebuilds every line of code, makes the EXEs, in all their various versions, languages, and #ifdef combinations, creates the installation package, and creates the final media — CDROM layout, download website, whatever.

Ask yourself the same question – Can you build your application in one step?

ADO.NET best practices – Reading data from data reader

I have seen many people using DataReader incorrectly. In this post, I will try to explain some good practices that can be followed when reading from a data reader. Consider the following problematic code,

SqlDataReader reader = /* ... */;
while (reader.Read())
{
    string userName = reader["user_name"].ToString();
    int age = int.Parse( reader["age"].ToString() );
    /* ... */
}
reader.Close();

How many problems can you figure out from the above code? There are many problems with this code,