Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

This post discusses the best placement for enum declarations in C#. While some argue that defining enums outside the class avoids extra typing, I believe that placing them inside the class improves code clarity, reduces ambiguity, and makes it easier to handle similarly named enums from different classes. IntelliSense helps with the extra typing. The original article argues against this, prioritizing less typing, but I find that less important than clarity and proper scoping.

I've posted another update to my ICMP ping tutorial series on MSDN Blogs. This installment focuses on crucial aspects like calculating checksums and serializing packets into byte arrays for transmission. While we haven't started sending data over the wire, understanding these concepts is vital for the next steps. Check out the post for more detail.

Wow! Google Blog Search indexed my latest post in just minutes! I was amazed by how fast it appeared in the search results after uploading. I'm curious if other search engines are this quick. Technorati is fast, but I have to ping them. With Google, it just worked automatically. Big kudos to Google and possibly Blogger for the seamless integration!

My Atom feed was truncating the description text, making it look odd. I've fixed the problem and hope it didn't affect my readers too much.

I've encountered a bug in IE6/7 where dynamically created checkboxes lose their checked status after being added to the document. Setting the checked property after appending the element seems to be a reliable workaround. If anyone knows why this behavior occurs, please contact me!

Part two of my C# Ping tutorial is now available! This installment dives into the structure of Ping packets and their place in the communication stack. It explores the fundamentals of how ping works, from sending echo packets to receiving echo responses and using response time to determine network connectivity.

I need to remember to learn more about the Dojo Toolkit, a JavaScript library.

I came across Matt Harrison's post discussing the challenges of choosing between various Ajax toolkits and frameworks, and it really resonated with me. He highlighted the OSA Foundation's survey of Ajax/JavaScript libraries, which covers a wide range of options like Dojo, DWR, JSON-RPC-JAVA, MochiKit, Prototype, Rico, SAJAX, Scriptaculous, Xajax, and Sack. It's fascinating to see how these libraries address different aspects of Ajax development. This makes me rethink my recent work on the backend XMLHttpRequest for Ajax Tagger Version 2, and whether leveraging existing solutions may have been more efficient. Links to the OSA Foundation, Michael Mahemoff's framework information, and my own previous blog post on Ajax layers are included for further exploration.

I'm back to blogging and starting a series on socket programming! First up: building a simple Ping client using System.Net.Sockets. I'll walk you through it, and as a starting point, you can check out the ICMP RFC. Stay tuned for more!

I found a cool fisheye effect using Javascript at the Dojo Toolkit website. Check it out, it's neat, but I'm not sure how practical it is.