Comments by Henry.Ayoola (Top 23 by date)

The OP's code is O(n^2) unless List has some really sophisticated RemoveAt logic.

They could add it as an extension to IEnumerable<t> without breaking List<t>. I just tested that it compiles, so unless there's a bug in the compiler the language spec allows disambiguation of the most specific method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle#The_modern_algorithm

This really should have been an extension method for IEnumerable<T>. One of a few things which aren't in the right places in .Net's collection libraries.

If I call RandomNumber(1024), what's the probability that it returns 1? (Hint: what value must r[0] take for that to happen?)

Reason for my vote of 1
It restricts to 256 possible return values, which no reasonable person would anticipate. It should be able to give any return value from 0 to maxvalue-1 with equal probability.

In what way is this about multi-cast?

Never mind. I must have written that comment before drinking my coffee.

However, it doesn't give a uniform distribution.

Because it gives you a uniform distribution (which your method doesn't) and has better algorithmic complexity and minimal consumption of random bits.

Reason for my vote of 1
A better way of doing this has been known for a very long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle

The second one does have compile-time errors, but it's easier to fix them than to install IKVM. BouncyCastle distribute dlls, so you don't need to compile anything if you take that route.

Reason for my vote of 5
Spot on.

You need to think about escaping as well as (pointed out already by @AspDotNetDev) not doing naïve string composition in a loop.

You seem to have modified my code without fully understanding it (although I admit that I messed up the bracketing). The point of the check (foo == 0xdf || ch > 0xff) was to avoid calling char.IsLetter on characters which were already known not to be letters. If you're going to pull that check out then you can ditch the inner check and just have a plain else clause.

StringBuilder isn't magic. If it has to expand its internal buffer then you still have garbage to collect. The real benefit of string.Format is the ability to use FormatInfo objects.