How to open 2 instances of Windows Media Player

TL;DR — Kill the Mutex!

Have you ever tried opening up 2 instances of Windows media player (WMP)?
Did you ever wonder how come you are able to open as many instances of Chrome as you like but you can open only 1 WMP…

Parallelism Gone Really Wrong

Couple days ago my friend told me that his team made a lot of efforts to Parallelise their computations for better performance. But strangely enough the performance worsened. Being a good friend i offered him to take a look at their code base. The problem was obvious — someone…

OOP destroyed encapsulation

TL;DR — Object oriented design did not bring encapsulation principles to software development, it broke it.

Many of my friends go to job interviews for software engineering positions, and the question they are asked a lot is “what are the advantages of…

The web is just a delivery mechanism

TL;DR — The web is just a delivery mechanism and your web browser is just another I/O device.

Finalizers are bad (or just dangerous)

TL;DR — Avoid Finalizers when possible!

Today i want to talk about the Finalization of objects in the .NET framework.
I find this subject important because one simple mistake in your Finalizer may get you in to a lot of trouble and may…

Your benchmarks are so wrong!

TL;DR — If you are measuring a relative execution time of 2 pieces of code, make sure to run under the Visual Studio debugger.

Disclaimer: this post is relevant to Visual Studio debugger. I did not check it on other platforms or debuggers.

Performance miracles of ToString()

TL;DR — When printing primitive types (like int32 etc…) consider using a ToString() method for much (much!) better performance.

TL;DR2 — Some people should stop using the terms “Boxing”/”Unboxing” whenever they can’t explain something.

How to work with XML?

TL;DR — When you are asked what is the right way of working with an XML file, remember, there is no 1 right way!

Another good header for this post might have been “The test that stumped them all”.