I started playing with .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 over the weekend. I quickly came to an interesting problem however. I switched a while ago on .NET 3.5 to using xUnit.NET instead of NUnit or the unit testing in Visual Studio 2008. I like to redistribute my test suites with my products as a support aid for end-users that are using my applications. Since I can’t redistribute the Visual Studio testing assemblies, I prefer the open source frameworks. But the problem that I quickly discovered was that neither xUnit.NET or NUnit supported .NET 4.0 yet, which is completely understandable. I figured out a couple of configuration changes that could be applied though to get unit tests to work and run in the .NET 4.0 runtime. More...

What I like about software development is that after developing software for sixteen years, I can still learn new things. Sometimes, in fact, like this morning, I can learn new things about topics that I thought that I’ve understood in the past, only to find out what I was wrong. I honestly believe that to be a good learner, you need to accept that not everything that you do is correct, and that sometimes you thought they were correct given your understanding of the information available, which in this case is accurate.

This morning, driven by some information that I noticed in the Objective-C documentation for the NSObject class, I decided to do some digging. In earlier posts about NSObject, I was looking at some of the similarities to the .NET System.Object class and the Java root Object class. Specifically, I was looking at the Equals and GetHashCode methods in .NET and their similar constructs in Java and Objective-C. The problem lay with the statements in the Objective-C documentation that said (summarized) an object should give back the same hash code each time and that if two objects are equal, then they should have the same hash code. More...