BackgroundWorker and UI threads
Popular belief (reinforced indirectly by MSDN) is that BackgroundWorker class will marshal the “progress” and “completed” events back to the calling thread. This turned out to be most certainly not […]
Hacker’s diary
How to design systems so you can waste your time debugging
A couple of days ago I spent several hours thanks to these two little design quirks. Quirk #1. Deadlock prone protocol design. Our program uses two client-server protocols. Let’s call […]
IEnumerable: lazy and dangerous
Time and time again I am burnt by the same bug. There are two kinds of enumerables in .NET: enumerators and generators. Enumerators go over some collection and return its […]
Apache 2.2.17: HTTPS+CONNECT still broken
The scenario is: someone opens an SSL connection to the Apache server, authenticates himself, and requests access to another host/port via CONNECT command. This is good for secure connection via […]
Another version of this product is already installed…
Trying to upgrade my Apache server, and getting this helpful message from Windows Installer. Well, this time I know it is Apache, but how many times I did not? How […]
WPF: Passing Data to Sub-Views via DataContext Causes Trouble
Imagine I have a main view that contains a number to sub-views. To be concrete, let’s assume that the sub-view is a user control of type PersonView that displays person’s […]
Possible WPF Bug: Input Field with Invalid Input Not Highlighted On Startup
I am building a WPF demo, and I wanted to include validation. My scenario cannot be simpler: I show a form to create a shipment, and when you click “Save” […]
MessageBoxes and worker threads
This will hopefully become a more organized article with code samples, but I need to record my results for now. Here’s the practical problem I encountered in the application I […]
.NET: Exception stack trace has no frames above the catch point
I never thought about it, but it turns out that exception’s stack trace does not contain the full stack. Instead, it contains only frames between the point where the exception […]
WPF: Merged dictionary parser depends on XML attribute order
Does attribute order in XAML matter? It should not, but sometimes it does. The following XAML compiles, but blows up at runtime with “Item has already been added” exception, both […]