OK, so libcheck has been around for a while. I actually made the code available publicly in the past via GotDotNet, but when I released it there, it was called WinChurn. Libcheck remains the core of this functionality, and it's an awesome little tool...

The CLR has submitted a few BOF sessions for consideration on the teched site. If you're going to be heading to teched this year, I'd suggestion going to http://www.msteched.com/cfp/bofvoting.aspx , and voting fore the session you think sound the most...

Is there such a thing as too many blogs? We've certainly pushed the limit in the past couple of days, and a few folks have pointed out that some of the entries are dropping off the view, and may be getting missed. Here's a list of all the blogs in the...

A critical list for all of you who want to pick up beta2 (and let's face it, who wouldn't?) and write code which can latter still run successfully on RTM bits (or at least, be in better shape to run). We have a lot of APIs which have been introduced during...

This is an interesting question, and the answer is a bit more than just "historical reasons." It's hard. Yes, it's just plain harder to parse code than it is to emit it. Parsing code is a good portion of what compilers do, and since most compilers are...

The CodeDom provides a powerful way for applications to emit source code in a variety of languages. CodeDom provides necessary infrastructure to generate common language features that are necessary across the languages instead of providing ways to generate...

Introduction Before going into detail of the changes in v2.0 I think it is important to start off with explaining the existing problems with the performance counter infrastructure. The first problem is the memory reserved for performance counters is fixed...

In V2.0 we sometimes needed to add fields to types that existed in V1.1. If this type just has the Serializable attribute applied to it this will break serialization compatibility with V1.1. Currently when 1.1 tries to deserialize an instance with this...

Keith Brown of PluralSight has begun a wiki page in which we're encouraging people to list their managed applications. The intent here is to simply start creating a list of all the many, and varied applications that people work on using .NET code. I'd...

The .NET Framework Design Guidelines on MSDN are getting updated but not that frequently. Many people have asked us to publish updates more often. I have been posting such updates here for some time now. Yesterday, I added new guidelines for throwing...

Many people ask about why Collection, ReadOnlyCollection, and KeyedCollection were moved to System.Collections.ObjectModel namespace. You can read the reasoning here .

Have you heard about PowerCollections ? It’s an extension library to the new generic collection classes in the System.Collections.Generic namespace. It contains many advanced collections and a ton of algorithms. You can also watch an MSDN TV broadcast...

One of my pet peeves is seeing people use obscure managed code related terms incorrectly. So, I thought I’d make a little game out of it… Can you match the term to their usage correct? Terms: CLR CLS CTS CLI CER Fill in the blank: The __ is a contract...

A correct way to do this will be as follows: // Get DirectorySecurity from source directory DirectorySecurity dsSrc = Directory.GetAccessControl(srcPath, AccessControlSections.Access); // Transfer ACL security descriptor byte[] sdBinary = dsSrc.GetSecurityDescriptorBinaryForm...

Krzysztof Cwalina showed me this cool trick to avoid boxing value types when working with generics and interfaces. This may be a bit dense but the trick is rarely seen and illustrative. Note before proceeding: This technique is only available in VS.NET...

There were very few noticeable changes between the V1.0 and the V1.1 release. One change that people sometimes notice is that Decimal looks different across the two versions. The changes are largely cosmetic, although in some rare cases applications have...

CodeDom now supports a way to generate code for CodeTypeMember. In V1.1 there is no way to generate a method without a type information using CodeDom. There are several tools and applications including ASP.Net had requirements to create a method without...

SafeHandle is the best way to represent handles in managed code today. For a high-level overview of what SafeHandle does, Ravi posted a writeup on the BCL blog titled SafeHandles: the best v2.0 feature of the .NET Framework . However, if anyone wants...

Rather than giving a short response to Jeff Atwood's question, ' If you had to pick one, what is the single most important feature in 2.0 that platform developers should be experimenting with and exploiting as soon as they get their hands on it? ', I...

One of the questions that seems to come up a lot is that someone wants to match balanced parenthesis. Something like the string “(aa (bbb) (bbb) aa)” and they want to match from the beginning parenthesis to the matching end parenthesis. Generally this...

In preparation for the next version of the product, we've collected suggestions for additions to the Math class and related classes. To give you an idea of the kinds of things people ask us for, here are a list of some of the requests we've received....

The IgnorePatternWhitespace option tells the Regex parser to ignore any spaces or tabs in your expression except if it is in a character class(ie [ ]). At first this may not seem all that useful but it really can increase the readability of a regular...

This came out of one of our internal security review. I thought I would post it here for beware sake. DirectoryInfo’s Name property currently requires no permission checks in and of itself, though you do need Read permission to construct a DirectoryInfo...

What are the New DateTime Features in Whidbey [Anthony Moore] DateTime has received quite a number of new features in Whidbey. Several of them have been mentioned in other blog posts. Here is a summary of all the new features added. Format Change After...

You might start noticing that in Whidbey Beta2, IO exceptions are handing out full qualified path which was previously regarded as secure information. Well, don’t be alarmed . This information is still secure and let me explain how. IO classes often take...