In my last post , I detailed the differences among read/write, read only, frozen and immutable collection types.  I described how immutable collections come with a hit to the garbage collector due to the garbage they generate during mutations. ...

[Update: a more recent post with new data on attainable performance of immutable collections ] The topics of immutability and functional programming has fascinated me lately.  Mostly because of my work on the Visual Studio Common Project System ...

Visual C++ 2010 includes a debugger extensibility point that makes it easy for people who have written their own debuggers, or wish to modify the way existing debuggers are launched, to do so. Check out the Visual C++ Debugger Launch Extension project...

For those of you who may think WPF is too slow, you gotta check this out. Visual Studio 2010's new WPF-based code editor is lightening fast, especially when compared over a fast FiOS Remote Desktop connection to gVim!

User Account Control, the feature in Vista that causes installers and some applications to require "elevation" to administrator privileges to run, cuts both ways.  It's designed to protect users from apps that try to make system-level changes...

The GZip encoder is not included in NetCF as it is on the desktop WCF, but it isn't hard to build yourself and in fact we have released a sample of exactly how to add your own GZip encoder to NetCF: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108652 So many...

Some humorous pros and cons to Visual Studio, if the Microsoft Office team were ever to take over. (disclaimer: this is a tongue in cheek post.  No offense -- only laughs intended) Visual Studio 2008 would be able to load VC7 projects, modify them...

You know that Find text box in the toolbar of Visual Studio?  Those of us who are keyboard-inclined probably never use it because Ctrl+F is quicker than moving your hand to the mouse.  But there is a hidden gem of a feature inside it that really...

If you are a web developer I hope you've considered accepting OpenID credentials for logging in your users.  If you have an ASP.NET web site, the process of adding OpenID support to your web site couldn't be easier when you use the free C# DotNetOpenId...

In C++, TCHAR, LPCTSTR, CString, and other types discretely change to their char/WCHAR, CStringA/CStringW counterparts depending on whether UNICODE is defined in your source code.  Cool.  By conscientiously using _countof(x) instead of sizeof...

Writing Visual Studio add-ins gives you the power to do some impressive things within the IDE to enhance your productivity.  Unfortunately getting your add-in to load into Visual Studio can sometimes be a pain.  Here's just a tip you should...

Well this is my first post as a member of the Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem team.  My second full day on the job, and I've found some less-than-ideal areas of Visual Studio that I'm eager to improve for myself and for you, our customers...

My first post in the provisioning series introduced what provisioning of your Windows Mobile device means and the basics of why you would want to do it.  In future posts I'll give some concrete examples of XML that accomplish a few common tasks. ...

Microsoft recently launched the MSDN Code Gallery for Microsoft employees and others to share code and software using the Microsoft Public License .  MSDN Code Gallery looks and feels very much like CodePlex , but Code Gallery lacks the TFS source...

I have accepted a new position within Microsoft with the Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem team.  Rather than working on the .NET Compact Framework I will be working on "VS10".  I don't actually make the transition for a few more...

The XmlSerializer found in the .NET Compact Framework has a very different implementation than the one found in the full .NET Framework.  The reasons for the differences include size and performance constraints that make the desktop's XmlSerializer...

The Windows Communication Foundation introduced the new DataContractSerializer to replace the XmlSerializer in many scenarios.  The DataContractSerializer is faster than the XmlSerializer, but has certain limitations.  For example it does not...

I recently discovered a very impressive (and free) Silverlight slideshow control. I would recommend it over any Flash-based slideshow controls that I've seen so far (because this one's better--not just because I work here <g>) Here's a sample: Watch...

The .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys have been released.  You can download them from here . Tools included in this package: Remote Performance Monitor and GC Heap Viewer – Provides real time counter data (ranging from Garbage Collector...

Disclaimer: some or all of these plug-ins are not Microsoft created or endorsed, and my pose a security risk by installing them without verifying their source. Paste From Console - automatically formats and colorizes text copied from a console window...

A lot of questions on the MSDN forums center around how to customize a device or an app to prefer a specific network connection over another.  The correct way to accomplish this is by "provisioning" the device.  In fact a great many...

A bug was discovered recently in the .NET Compact Framework version 2.0 (SP2 and earlier) and 3.5 that causes HttpWebRequest's directed at some HTTPS servers to fail with this error: (for web services) System.Net.WebException: Unable to read data from...

So I had the opportunity to try out the iPhone for a day.  Overall I was impressed, but there were some very basic features missing from many of the otherwise killer apps that I would greatly miss if I was to use the iPhone as my primary PDA and...

The XmlSerializer in NetCF 2.0 has a bug where if a single serialization requires reflecting into types that use a mixture of Collection<T>-like types for the same T the XmlSerializer will throw an exception.  Here an example where CF 2.0 would...

With the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 release which comes with Visual Studio 2008, a new Windows Communication Foundation transport is introduced that uses email as the communication mechanism. Others have already blogged about this new transport including...