My Life and Code

In my early teen years, I used to watch Dr Who on our local PBS affiliate on Saturday afternoons. I haven't seen it in years, but for some reason I was reminded of it one day this week. Later that same day, a co-worker mentioned it to me, and then a day or two later someone else brought it up. I thought it was kind of funny that this TV show I hadn't watched since I was a teenager was now frequently popping up. This, in turn, reminded me of a particularly odd VHS tape cover I'd seen when I was still a teenager. The third actor to play Dr. Who was a gentleman named Jon Pertwee. It seems like everyone's favorite Dr. Who is Tom Baker, who was the fourth actor to play the part, but I never saw much of Tom Baker's work, and my personal favorite is Jon Pertwee. And at some point, a VHS release of some of his best work was released, but it had an extremely odd photo of Mr. Pertwee on the cover:   I'm not sure what they were thinking when they chose this phot

I recently added some new methods to an existing RESTful WCF service and needed to consume these methods from an application which had not previously made use of this service. To make this easier, I created the following generic method. It could probably use a little refinement (specifically some code to handle what happens if an attempt is made to cast the service method result to an incorrect type), but it does the trick. using  System.IO; using  System.Net; using  System.Runtime.Serialization; using  System.Text; namespace  RESTService.Helpers {      public   static   class   RESTServiceHelpers     {          public   static  T GetResultFromRESTServiceMethod<T>( string  url)         {             HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);             request.KeepAlive =  true ;             request.Method =  "GET" ;              using  (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())             {                  En