Having been a participant on Programmers for quite some time now, I am no stranger to new users and drive-by posters. Despite Programmers' reputation as "the least understood site on the network," there are still a few categories of questions that are clearly and undisputably off-topic: Code t...

Can someone explain the implications of using with (nolock) on queries, when you should/shouldn't use it? For example, if you have a banking application with high transaction rates and a lot of data in certain tables, in what types of queries would nolock be okay? Are there cases when you shoul...

Often these questions are closed. In days of old they would have been closed as "not a real question" or "too localized." The reasoning behind this is that there isn't really anything that one can answer definitively and draws upon our expert knowledge as a programmer. Furthermore, there are an...

Quite often, especially with the tag 'java', I have come across questions that contain a code snippet followed by "How does this code work?" or "What is this code doing?" or sometimes even an implicit query stated as "I don't understand what this code is doing." How should such questions be deal...

Too Broad is absolutely the correct close reason for "lacks a minimal understanding of the problem." Here's why: ME: Click the right mouse button. NOOB: What's a mouse? How much text do you suppose it will take to explain things now?

I've been looking for a way to store and retrieve values on more than the single key that C#'s generic Dictionary class provides. Searching around the web (and on SO itself) has shown me a couple options: Tuple Based Dictionaries .NET 4.0 makes it easy to support a generic Tuple<,> class. This...