Introduction

Every programmer has a certain set of, routines that he refers back to and uses over and over again. These utility functions are usually bits of code that are not provided by any particular language or framework. This chapter is a compilation of utility routines that we have gathered during our time with C# and the .NET Framework. The type of things found in this chapter are:

• Determining the path for various locations in the operating system

• Interacting with services

• Inspecting the Global Assembly Cache

• Message queuing

It is a grab bag of code that can help to solve a specific need while you are working on a larger set of functionality in your application.