We are pleased to announce "Smarties 2008" now is called IntelliCommands. Some of you might have already guessed that at one point we would rename "Smarties 2008" to something else. It was a good timing for us to make the change now rather than later.

We have previously announced about the price changes to IntelliCommands from 1st of August. After the re-evaluation and seeking professional advice we will make significant changes to the licensing model that also reflect further changes to IntelliCommands pricing.

In this release you would find five new commands, few enhancements, and four fixes. The main focus of this release was the sorting features in .Net. Now you can create sortable collections and implement IComparable and/or generic IComparable interfaces effortlessly. These commands are part of creating rich classes using IntelliCommands.

Storing a collection of reference types and value types is a common practice in Software Development. Since the introduction of the Generic Types in Framework 2.0 working with collection elements has become much easier.

The ArrayList type used to be the common type for storing objects but the new kid on the block “Generic List” has taken away the popularity from the ArrayList. Since elements were stored as an object casting reference types from object to enclosing type needed the extra coding and decreased the performance. With value types the developers faced the boxing issue at storing time and unboxing when the data was retrieved from an instance of ArrayList object.

To take advantage of this article you must have a basic understanding of IDisposable pattern already. Dan Rigsby has recently published a great article on how to implement IDisposable pattern. You will find complete code snippets and download link to the source code on his blog.

There is a misperception about IDisposable that it is used only when you have unmanaged resources declared in classes. The MSDN Library documentation is partially to be blamed for this for mentioning the "unmanaged resources" only not both managed and unmanaged resources.