I Love that New Syntax Smell

Recently launched at http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog , the VC team is attempting an almost frightening level of transparency (in my opinion). Customer comments I've read so far have ranged from mildly disinterested to "I'm never going to use your product...

Disclaimer. This is an ancient post. By the looks of it, I originally intended to write this almost a year ago, as a follow up to my scalar properties writeup . That was back when I was testing properties (and more exactly, default properties) and some...

Back from the dead Well, not precisely dead, but I certainly began feeling that way - shipping a product is hard work, and it is incredibly easy to get "heads down." Here on the VCQA team, we're very focused on stabilization. A lot of testruns. Harsh...

Astute readers may note two things: 1) It has been a while since I posted what should have been a followup to the previous posts, wherein I complete my discussion of the C++ DF model, and finally get this DF monkey off my back. And 2) that a previous...

Long ago , I wrote a post on the first part of DF benefits. Now, I'm finally getting back to it. My apologies about the laxness in posting. Blame it on my Cards losing to the Sox. And on being really busy with testpasses and bug bounces for a while. We...

I'm pretty angry at blogs.msdn.com right now (or maybe I'm just angry at myself), as it completely nuked a post I had composed, because my session had timed out on it. I went to post, and it asked me to log in, and in the process destroyed a lot of work...

A large subject like DF needs a few posts. My generalized plan to lay it out will start by describing the CLR's Dispose pattern, how our DF pattern works, and finally how the two patterns fit together. The CLR's Dispose patterns can be quite confusing...

Reader Andy Neilson writes in with another bug: The current compiler implementation has some problems. If the variable is a field of this, then the compiler will die. For example: class MyClass { public: int i; void Foo() { array<int>^ x = {1, 2...

Reader Rob Walker asks: Is there a neat way of handling dictionaries? I have a Dictionary<Guid, Object^> and want to iterate over the values. Currently I have to use the syntax: for each(KeyValuePair<Guid, Object^> v in dict) { v.Value .....

For Each? I won't go into a huge justification - suffice to say, there are some instances where it is nice to be able to iterate over a set, and perform operations on each member of that set. A good primer might be the MSDN node on C# foreach . A basic...

Hot on the heels of my article on interior pointers, comes a much more insightful one by Stan Lippman on the same issue . That happens sometimes. I enjoyed the chat we had on the VC++ 2005 Beta, and I wanted to point that there are two other online chats...

We're having an online VC++ chat this coming Thursday. I and several of my coworkers from all areas of the product (IDE, front-end, back-end, etc.) will be available for questions. If you're interested in attending, here's the announcement they asked...

Where's the rest of the properties stuff? I was going to write about default properties in this entry (and have quite a lengthy one saved for future use), but there are a few disagreements I have with the current implementation of default properties,...

What are properties? Technically, properties are CLR "aliases." They are exposed as standard methods, and any compiler that consumes them simply transforms the user's code into the proper function calls. Similarly, any compiler that wants to author...

A reader asked the question: Is .NET, in fact, the SAME THING as Visual Studio 7.0? Could it be possible that a developer with .NET would be able to simply open the project file and recompile without rewriting code? .NET itself is a runtime....

Finally! VC++ 2005 Beta1 has dropped, and we had a little party last Friday to celebrate. It was nothing fancy, and I spent most of my time playing bridge in a corner. The full beta is only available to MSDN Subscribers now, and selected partners, but...

How do bugs in the VC++ compiler go from discovery, to fix, to maintainance?...

This will be the first post in a new category, “A day in the life.“ Through these posts, I hope to provide some background into what QA for the compiler team is like. Hopefully, you won't think I'm a bungling idiot. So, to get the ball rolling, I thought I might try and give a bit of perspective as to how we sometimes stumble across bugs....

Go here to get a free command-line version of VC++ .NET 2003. For you misers, I'm sure you could trick the 7.0 IDE (or even the 6.0 one) into using these new binaries. This was mentioned on Slashdot on Sunday. I'd recommend carefully reading the included...

This is a quickie . I have some other blog posts about interesting material on the horizon, but I'm always wary of posting information without knowing whether I'm going to violate NDA by writing about it. There should be a real flurry of activity when...

Joel just posted over on his blog that the CLR team has some open headcount - they're looking to fill a few positions. I can say that working for Microsoft has been one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my short life (pay no attention...

I'm not going to belabor my blog with yet another code explanation. I've converted the dynamic layout example (found here ) from C# to C++. It isn't especially interesting, but it is good groundwork for later examples and projects. Get the code! You...

This will be the third time I tried to start this post. Let's see if I get derailed yet again, or if I can actually finish it this time and get it up on the blog. To break from the monotony of Windows Forms, I'm uploading a snippet that wasn't originally...

Sometimes, its good to check the blogs.msdn.com aggregator . I was linked by Five Testers from VC today, whom I kept meaning to link, except that I could never remember what their URL is. One of them is my boss's boss, and the guy who convinced me that...

Now that we've gotten our feet wet, it's time to try something a bit more complicated. We'll include a TextBox and a Button in this example, and also take a quick look at how we wire up events on actions like button clicks. I'm going to be skipping the...