October, 2004

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...