George Family Code Blog

Anytime a C# expression (I presume the same goes for VB) contains a non-constant value, the compiler will not check for out-of-bounds values. For example, if you initialize an integer as the sum of two values, one of which is outside the bounds for integers (-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647), a runtime overflow exception will be generated, but not a compile error. Apparently checking for out-of-bounds values is computationally intensive and most of the time simply isn't worth the time/energy. However, if it is critical that your application generate a compile error for out-of-bounds values, you can use the checked keyword, which is actually classified as a primary operator in C# by Microsoft. You can put checked() around a statement you know might cause an overflow exception or checked{} around a block of code. You can also create a CheckedMethod() or if you want to explicitly avoid overflow checking, use the unchecked keyword or use UncheckedMethod() . Check (pun intended...

.NET assemblies can be single-file or multifile.   As I've been preparing to take Microsoft Exam 70-483, I came across the Al.exe command, a tool which is installed along with Visual Studio. Al stands for "Assembly Linker" and when you run it, it "links" different manifest or resource files together into a single assembly. If you work with .NET at all, you probably have a pretty good idea of what an assembly is, but here's a simple definition from Stack Overflow : "A chunk of (precompiled) code that can be executed by the .NET runtime environment. A .NET program consists of one or more assemblies." -Adrian Grigore Here's a more technical definition from Wikipedia :  "A compiled code library used for deployment, versioning, and security."  Normally when you create a new project in Visual Studio, VS pretty much creates the assembly for you. You don't have to worry about merging different files together using the c...

Image saved from my new ShinyApp Over the past few days I've been playing around with R, a statistical language which is essentially an offshoot of S, which was created in the 1980's. R has some powerful features which enable to it rapidly create meaningful graphical illustrations. I've really enjoyed manipulating some of the datasets on Kaggle with it. Here's a ShinyApp I published to demonstrate a simple R program to track where different plant and animal species live within the US national parks.