Please, don’t ever use the “Remove Unused Namespaces” feature
Seriously, I don't know why this feature exists or who thought it would be a good idea. The time it takes to compile even the most complicated C# file is trivial.
On the other hand, when I try to access the .Take() method in System.Linq, or the Encoding class in System.Text, or suddenly I need a new List<T> from System.Collections.Generic - if you have used a tool to remove unused namespaces from your C# code file - you have made me wonder why my editor isn't detecting it.
There's a reason that many default namespaces are included with a default C# code file. Leave them there! Maintenance programmers will love you forever.
Another Reason to Avoid Automatic Properties
Another reason to avoid using Automatic Properties:
[Name("Simple Property Example")] [Browsable(true)] public string TestProp1 { get; set; }
Look at the property in the debugger:
Oh wait, I can't.
I can't even set a breakpoint to let me know when the property is being accessed. I understand not being able to see the backing store or the value component - they are after all not part of the code. But you can't even see when they're being hit.
All I have to say is...
STAY AWAY.
Where Have All My Gigabytes Gone?
I don't know if this is a Windows Vista-specific trick, or maybe something related to Volume Shadow Copy (the service that supports System Restore), but there seems to be a major discrepancy on my hard drive.
In Windows Explorer, open the C drive, select all, then Alt+Enter to open the properties dialog.
Size: 128gb (137,787,853,411 bytes)
Size on disk: 129gb (138,600,678,813 bytes) (Note: I don't know how there's an odd number of bytes, except that apparently NTFS uses some type of odd clustering strategy - to my knowledge, the "size on disk" field should be a multiple of 4,096, the default NTFS partition cluster size for this size disk).
Now I navigate up to My Computer, right-click on the C drive and choose properties.
Used space: 267gb (287,193,178,112 bytes)
Free space: 664gb (713,020,395,520 bytes)
(This drive is a RAID-0 stripe of two Maxtor 500gb SATA drives)
Now if I set it to display protected OS files and folders, I can come up with a few new items:
4gb in hiberfil.sys (Hibernation support)
4gb in pagefile.sys (Virtual memory swap file)
132gb in \System Volume Information (System Restore)
Looks like I've discovered the reason for the space usage - System Restore. Ugh. Hard to believe I've had this installation of Windows active for about, what, not even a week? And System Restore has managed to take up more space than the files I've installed. The good news is, with it set at 15%, I'll probably only get another 7gb taken. Still.... It's just incredible to me that it's filled so fast.