Locks and exceptions do not mix

A couple years ago I wrote a bit about how our codegen for the lock statement could sometimes lead to situations in which an unoptimized build had different potential deadlocks than an optimized build of the same source code. This is unfortunate, so we’ve fixed that for C# 4.0. However, all is still not rainbows, unicorns and Obama, as we’ll see.
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Representation and identity

(Note: not to be confused with Inheritance and Representation.)

I get a fair number of questions about the C# cast operator. The most frequent question I get is:

short sss = 123;
object ooo = sss;            // Box the short.
int iii = (int) sss;         // Perfectly legal.
int jjj = (int) (short) ooo; // Perfectly legal
int kkk = (int) ooo;         // Invalid cast exception?! Why?

Why? Because a boxed T can only be unboxed to T (or Nullable<T>.) Once it is unboxed, it’s just a value that can be cast as usual, so the double cast works just fine.
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