Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Donn Felker has a great post that explains the different uses of LINQ's ToLookup and ToDictionary.  Check it out!

If you need a full-featured object mapper with minimal set up, I recommend you take a look at AutoMapper on Codeplex.  If you need a quick-and-dirty solution, maybe the following code could help you out.

Suppose you have the following component:

No, I'm not going to pick Java as a "language to learn" in 2010.  However, I did a little Java development in 2009 (Blackberry, specifically) and was also the developer for the Blackberry version of the CodeMash mobile-application "MobiMash".

Here it is 2010 and I just noticed while trying to use the CodeDom features of .NET that it defaults to using the .NET 2.0 compiler.  You have to specifically tell it to use .NET 3.5.  Thanks to LukeH and a Stack Overflow question, it was an easy solution:

I recently had to whip up a small diagnostics application for a client.  We were having some connection problems with a component so we wanted to wrap a WinForms GUI around the component and display some debugging information to try and diagnose it.

Another home appliance repair story that has parallels to software development.

Yes, the first month of 2010 is almost gone and I'm just now getting around blogging about the past year and the year ahead.  I guess time management should be on my to-do list for this year?