Adam Nathan's Old Blog

I guess I'm not cut out to be a journalist. Two weeks ago when I decided to spend my weekend creating the PINVOKE.NET wiki, I had a great opportunity to awaken my blog from its deep slumber by announcing it to the world. But Ben , Brad , Brian...

When exposing managed types as COM types, your classes must have CLSIDs, your interfaces must have IIDs, and so on. System.Runtime.InteropServices provides a custom attribute (GuidAttribute) that enables you to be explicit about these GUIDs. But the CLR...

Many people know about Don 's infamous IUNKNWN and INFOSET license plates, but recently I've been noticing more technology-inspired license plates around town.  Just the other day at the grocery store, I saw a car with a GUID license plate...

Looking at the card games that ship with Windows XP, I think one of the most obvious opportunities for improvement is the look & feel of the playing cards. These games use a shared library known as cards.dll to draw cards that look like... um... this...

The following C# code has the goal of enabling managed code to call CreateDC , but it's incorrect. Calling all Interop aficionados... Can you see what's wrong? using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; internal class DeviceContext...

Recently Tim shared some code for extending Windows Vista Aero "Glass" inside a Windows Forms window . It sounds like he's eventually planning on showing this with WPF (among other things). I also looked into this for my upcoming WPF book, and I couldn...

A few months ago I mentioned that my .NET and COM book went out of print . Well, after getting regular streams of e-mail from people who still wanted to get a copy (which I forwarded on to the publisher), I can now happily say that they are planning to...

To correspond with my PDC talk about making an application "light up" on Windows Vista, I've created www.winfxhearts.com . This site has a ClickOnce link that enables you can play a version of my new & improved Internet Hearts game. Here's a "before...

…that make all the difference in the world to me. I've been using Beta 1 a lot recently, and although " most of the stuff that we would expect that tech enthusiasts and consumers will be interested in will happen at Beta 2 ," every once in awhile come...

Jim Miller, one of the CLR's brilliant architects, has been known to go months being clean shaven and go months being the exact opposite of clean shaven. He just switched modes again, and nobody at work recognizes him. He claims he did this because needed...

Version 1.1 of the .NET Framework introduces a handy feature called Customer Debug Probes (CDP). These probes enable you to find and diagnose difficult bugs lurking in managed code, even in a production environment. I'll share the details of each probe...

The last blog touched on apartment states of managed threads, which the CLR tracks for COM interoperability purposes. But if an application changes the apartment state of a thread being tracked by the CLR (via unmanaged code or direct calls to CoUninitialize...

Now that I'm set up at my new blogging home, I'd like to get some feedback from anyone who has used the CLR SPY tool that I've uploaded to gotdotnet.com and blogged a lot about in the past. We're investigating shipping the tool in the .NET Framework...

Sorry for my recent lack of blogging. There's been a lot going on these days! As the banner on my blog now indicates, you'll be able to catch me at two upcoming conferences. As with TechEd in June, Sonja Keserovic and I will be giving an Interop presentation...

In my next blog entry, I'll explain the 11th and final Customer Debug Probe (CDP) that exists in the v1.1 product. But for the next version of the product (code-named Whidbey), we're looking at adding additional probes, and not just in the area of Interop...

The Object Not Kept Alive and Buffer Overrun probes are unlike any other CDPs, because they do not output any messages to report bugs in your code. Instead, they change general CLR behavior with the goal of forcing non-deterministic bugs that can be almost...

Last week a coworker brought this article by Jeff Atwood to my attention: Coding Horror: How Not To Write a Technical Book Of course, I'm flattered by what Jeff (and commenters) said, and I'm happy that he gave my book a chance (especially since...

Last year, Chris Sells wrote a series of articles in which he set out to rewrite Solitaire using Avalon. The lack of scaling graphics in the Win32 version (and lack of access to its source code, I suppose) forced him down the road of rewriting the app...

The C# code below, when executed, prints the following: 0x80004002 0x80004002 Who can figure out why the second line printed isn't 0x80004003 ? using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; public class Quiz { const int...

In August I mentioned some of the little improvements in Windows Vista Beta 1 that made using my computer more enjoyable . Now that I've installed the December CTP (released yesterday), here are some screenshots of a few new things that instantly jump...

Long time no blog, but I’ve got a good excuse. Since my last post, I’ve become a father! This event, of course, made me seriously doubt (even more than usual) the wisdom of writing another book. Here's a quote from my wife: “You wrote a book during...

Could wikis be the solution to all the world's problems? Probably not, but I've created another one anyway. It's called XAMLshare . I'm starting to see folks share XAML samples on their blogs (myself included), and thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to...

TechEd made me gain about 5 pounds, and my bag somehow gained 20 pounds. (And I didn't get a single piece of swag from the Product Pavilion, I swear.) But I'm back in Redmond after a 24-hour journey from Orlando to Seattle, due to delays at Chicago O...

In case you missed it, the official name for "Avalon" is Windows Presentation Foundation and the official name for "Indigo" is Windows Communication Foundation . Hmmm. I guess this is the answer for folks that felt the Vista name was too creative and...

Every once in awhile I come across a blog post that mentions my Interop book or pinvoke.net, but this one is a first: For some reason, someone who goes by " Benzado " recently found and linked to a so-called "artificial intelligence" CS project I did...