This post discusses features in the preview version of MEF, and some details may change between now and the full release.
The MEF team has been quietly at work for some time getting the finishing touches on another developer preview. You can download the new source and .NET 4.0-compatible binaries from the Codeplex site.
Useful resources for porting existing .NET code to Metro style apps.
Memory mapped files are a powerful technique for random file access and inter-process communication, but like all powerful techniques they come with some quirks. One subtle nuance is that the size of a memory mapped file is always expanded up to the next virtual memory page boundary. This means that developers must track the difference between the useful memory contents containing data, and junk bytes that fill the space up to the next virtual memory page boundary.
The .NET Framework composite formatting feature supports options such as right or left alignment. However, some advanced alignment options are not supported. For instance, composite formatting does not support aligning numeric values in a field on their decimal points. However, this kind of alignment can be easily implemented. This blog post illustrates two alternative approaches to implementing decimal point alignment.
Regular Expressions (RegEx) are a powerful tool for searching for text that matches specific patterns, but it is also a complex tool that requires care and attention to detail. There are many caveats to using RegEx.Here, I would like to briefly talk about a common caveat when using RegEx: the set operator [ ] and its effect on the contained tokens...
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The most commonly used methods for parsing textual data into DateTime or DateTimeOffset values are different overloads of DateTime.Parse and DateTimeOffset.Parse. However, for many formats these methods throw a FormatException when they attempt to perform the conversion, and their corresponding TryParse overloads all return false. The .NET Framework provides two alternative method families: ParseExact and TryParseExact, that can be used to parse the string representations of date and time values. This article explores their usage.
We are very excited to announce a planned release of a really exciting new product.
The Base Class Libraries team, the wider CLR team and Microsoft Research worked hard on this new technology and we are very proud to be able to share the news. Read the full article for details.
Regular expressions in the .NET Framework support a number of grouping constructs, which allow a regular expression pattern to be grouped into one or more subexpressions. Grouping constructs are essential for creating backreferences, as well as for defining a subexpression to which a quantifier is applied.