December 2008 Entries

Using Exception Handling to Retry an Operation

I got the following question via e-mail: I want to catch timeout errors when I execute a script. Catching the error is easy, but I then want to retry 3 times. In VB6 I could just resume a command when I caught the error. How can I do this with vb 2008 using try..catch? This is a case where two different techniques come into play. The first is using a number of Catch statements to allow you to catch specific types of exceptions. The second is to make essentially a recursive call to the function, with ...
Posted On Thursday, December 18, 2008 9:37 AM | Comments (2)

VB Dev Center Article Published

The work I did on benchmarking DataTable performance (or lack thereof *cough cough*) has been published in an article on the MSDN VB Dev Center. For those of you wondering about the results I mentioned a few months ago, they're included there. I've also included some work on benchmarking LINQ select queries and aggregation in comparison to the DataTable equivalents. Many thanks to Beth Massi for helping get this published ...
Posted On Wednesday, December 17, 2008 1:59 PM | Comments (1)

How to keep VS2010 CTP working past 1/1/2009

For those of you playing with the VS2010 CTP, you've probably noticed that it's going to stop working around New Years. Jeff Beehler just posted this blog entry on how to extend the life of your (new) VS2010 VPC beyond that time
Posted On Wednesday, December 10, 2008 8:34 AM | Comments (0)

Accidental Perplexity

I was discussing accidental complexity with some co-workers after reading Dave Bouwman's recent post. One of them coined the phrase "accidental perplexity," which we quickly defined as "when you look at a code base and can't figure out what on earth the developer was thinking." This is especially bad when the core reason for the perplexity is in the architecture ...
Posted On Tuesday, December 09, 2008 2:40 PM | Comments (0)

Try/Catch Performance

I'm really not obsessed with performance -- honest! However, when a co-worker asked me today exception handling was an acceptable way of coding defensively, my reaction was rather predictable. Exceptions are pure evil, and should be... well, exceptional. Yes, you guessed it. The next question was "How bad is try/catch really?" The short answer is that is involves minimal overhead... unless an exception is thrown. In that case, the .NET exception handling mechanism does a few nice things, like providing ...
Posted On Monday, December 01, 2008 5:06 PM | Comments (8)