I tried to update my Linux distribution this week by starting over on a fresh virtual PC. I tried SuSE 9.1 Personal only to have a kernel panic early in the installation. Then I tried Fedora Core 2 only to have another kernel panic. That’s when I began to suspect a more sinister problem and found this bug entry - complete with a 57 step work around.

Maybe I'll just wait three months and try again.

Bil Simser has some information on using this little known property of the Session object.

I’ve found static constructors very appealing in .NET class design. I think this is partially due to coming into .NET with a C++ background. Although there are techniques available to achieve the same effect in C++, the language did not have the syntax to support the concept as elegantly.

The first time I received the “Do not declare explicit static constructors” message from FxCop I was a bit dismayed. Why is it telling me there is a performance penalty for a static constructor? One caveat I’ve always had with FxCop is that the tool enforces design guidelines for a framework, and these guidelines are not necessarily the same guidelines you’d want for an application. To get to the bottom of the critical warning message about static constructors required some research.

The key is a metadata flag the compiler adds to a class without an explicit static constructor – the beforefieldinit flag. In the code below, both Foo and Bar should appear identical in their behavior, and really they are almost identical if you look at both with a decompiler. The difference is, Foo will have the beforefieldinit flag, and Bar will not.

class Foo
{
    public static string Message
   {
      get { return _message; }
   }
 
   static string _message = "Hello World!";
 
}
 
class Bar
{
   static Bar()
   {
      _message = "Hello World!";
   }
 
   public static string Message
   {
      get { return _message; }
   }
 
   static string _message;
}’

Brad Abrams has some details about beforefieldinit in his blog post from earlier this year. However, after doing some experiments I’d give a slightly different description about the effects of beforefieldinit.

The beforefieldinit flag allows the runtime to be very ‘eager’ in calling a static constructor, a.k.a a type initializer. This is in contrast to being lazy and calling the static constructor at the last possible moment (in hopes you might not need to call it at all). The difference between eagerness and laziness can be demonstrated by timing the following code using Foo and then Bar.

for(int i = 0; i  <  Int32.MaxValue - 1; i++)
{
   string s = Foo.Message;
}

In my experiments, looping with Bar (explicit static constructor) will perform about 5x slower than looping with Foo (implicit static constructor and beforefieldinit set). With Bar in the loop, the runtime must invoke the static constructor at the last possible moment (the spec says it), so the check to see if the type constructor needs invoked is inside the loop. With Foo and the beforefieldinit flag, the runtime is free to eagerly execute the static constructor before the loop starts and thus avoid the overhead of further checks.

Obviously I’ve created a worst case scenario to see the possible performance impact, and performance should not always dictate design decisions. Still, I’m a little disappointed that my beloved static constructors feel a little bit tainted now.

If you are looking for online resources about the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit, here are a couple places to look:

Stephen Redd’s Site (full of CSK Articles, Mods, and Fixes)

Dave Rank’s Personal Web Site

Matthew Roche’s CSK Resources 

Football season (American) started today. To be precise, it started on Thursday night, but since we never had football games on Thusday nights when I was growing up as a kid, I tend to pretend this doesn’t happen.

A few years ago, my interest in pro football was on the decline. This was around the time when football began to morph from being a team sport into a form of modern dance, and players began to augment their costumes with cellular phones and permanent markers. Plus, the Steelers can never seem to get back to the super bowl, so, really, who cares?

One way to make anything interesting is to have a pool. A pool is where a bunch of people will put money into a pot and predict the outcome of some event, like football games. Whoever picks the highest number of game winners correctly wins a percentage of the pot.

Being in an office football pool is not about winning money, which might be enough to buy lunch for two. It’s about winning the pool and having bragging rights for a week. Winning means going to work and pretending you really knew what was going on when you made your winning selections, even though you might not have done it alone.

Me: “Alex, who do you think will win – the Eagles or the Browns?”

Alex (my now five year old son): “What is a Brown?”

Me: “Well .... it’s basically a dull color”.

Alex: “Eagles!”.

A few years ago I started a little pool at the office by sending an email to the staff@ alias (first mistake). This brought a response from the human resources department that football pools fall into a ‘legal grey area’ and I should refrain from mentioning ‘football pool’ at work. No problem, I thought, I had an email list of 30 people interested in a little fun, so I fired off an email to this list without actually checking who was on it (second mistake). Well, it turns out our CFO was on the list, and I’m not sure why, because he never actually played in the pool, but he did, it seems, mention to HR that I was running a football pool.

The next day I stood in the office of the Supreme Ministry Of Human Resources and explained why I disobeyed a direct order. I had to cross my heart, and swear that I would not be using company resources to run illicit gambling activities. It was the last pool I ever ran, and my time spent watching football is asymptotically approaching zero. If the Steelers make the playoffs, somebody please let me know.

Kenny Kerr continues his introduction to MSIL.

Richard Dudley takes a look at causes and solutions to the “Login Failed” error message with Crystal Reports.