Aaron Hoffman's Blog

I'm not sure why, but I had a sudden rush of Norwegian pride today.

I wrote this Silverlight app for my Cousin. The trickiest part was raising an event after a random amount of time for the "Wait..." portion of the test. I ended up using a "DispatcherTimer" and set the interval to a Random amount of seconds. Have Fun!

Jeff Atwood ( Coding Horror , StackOverflow ) recently wrote a blog post about the Monty Hall Problem . So I thought I'd write a little app that simulates the tests. I have always thought the contestant has three options, Always Switch (66%), Always Stay (33%), AND Pick Again (50%). People who say your chance is 50/50 after one door is taken out of the equation, are Correct , IF you randomly choose the second door at that time. Check out the app below. WD = Winning Door. FC = First Choice. RD = Removed Door. SC = Second Choice.

Deconstructing a LINQ Statement (download source code: http://aaronhoffman.googlecode.com/files/AaronHoffmanLinqDemov01.zip ) LINQ is a valuable tool, but because of the way it is usually demonstrated, developers think that its only use is for querying a Microsoft SQL Server database. This is because it is usually being demonstrated along with "LINQ to SQL". LINQ is not just LINQ to SQL . I like to think of LINQ as a shorthand (or syntax shortcut) way of writing code - a way to write less lines of code (or simplify code), but still perform the same operations (kind of like what foreach is to the for loop). I would like to demonstrate LINQ in a way that does not use LINQ to SQL. I will break down a LINQ statement into lines of code that developers might be more familiar with in an attempt to show what is going on under the covers. I will start with code that hopefully everyone has seen/written before, then build up to a LINQ statement that performs the same operation.

With the Hawks playing undefeated Penn State today I thought we could use a little extra Hawkeye Cheer. Here are some desktop backgrounds (wallpapers) I made while waiting for the game to start. GO HAWKS! Flickr Set (View All): http://flickr.com/photos/81686327@N00/sets/72157608766693839/ UPDATE: Hawks Win! Iowa 24 - Penn St 23