I recently came across a bug in FileStream’s internal buffer where the behavior is non-intuitive, so I thought I would discuss it. Filestream uses one internal buffer for both reading and writing (scary but memory efficient). Unfortunately, this means...

Performance counter categories come in one of two modes: single instance and multi-instance. If you want your category to be visible through WMI, it's important to know the difference. A single instance category has only one machine wide value for each...

With Whidbey Beta 1, we've done some performance optimizations for Streams & byte[]'s stored in .resources files. The optimizations for byte[]'s are the relatively obvious ones - don't use serialization, etc. The interesting change happened for MemoryStream...

We get an ongoing number of questions about formatting numbers in .NET. The documentation seems to be notoriously difficult to find. I thought I'd give a quick overview here, with a sample. First note for future reference: to find the write page in the...

I thought I'd make the Nullable specification available to everyone, for reference, and in order to allow you to ask any questions/issues. This is about to go through an ECMA review as well, so it should be interesting to see what their issues/comments...

A customer recently asked how to compare to see whether two paths refer to the same file, and he wanted to do this using a canonical path name. This turns out to be a non-trivial problem. Instead of talking about canonical path names which are somewhat...

In NT, System.IO.Ports.SerialStream synchronous Read()/Write() operations are done asynchronously. That is, for every Read() operation a BeginRead() is issued on a thread-pool thread and an immediate call to EndRead() waits for the operation to complete...

All, thought I would post some notes from a recent meeting we had with the WebData team. This is in relation to a Tree class they have created internally in their namespaces, and what we should consider doing with it. The reference to 'our redblack' tree...

Well all, I haven't posted for a couple of weeks, and I thought I would share some fun with you, from an exercise we're going through to clean up the libraries before we ship. Of course, we're pretty aggressive about ensuring that we get a bunch of clean...