March, 2005

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....

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...

One of the changes in Whidbey will be a revamped tracing system. Much is unchanged - tracing messages are sent through switches to listeners where the data is reported in some fashion. One of the main differences is the inclusion of the TraceSource type...

A heads-up all. The BCL has a chance next week to provide some added value, and we thought we'd keep as the focus, making a number of blog entries and samples. We'll hopefully see a great range of topics pour forth from this blog next Tuesday, so keep...

When opening up a new project in Visual Studio, one finds many, many options for deploying your new killer app: Windows Applications, Console Applications, and Web Services are all popular choices. Even when creating a simple daemon-type process, however...

A few astute users of our generic collections observed that we no longer provide a public SyncRoot property on ICollection<T>. I believe we're better off not providing it. You often want to do synchronization at some higher level in your application...

OK, in response to Jeff Atwood’s questions: “If you had to pick one, what is the single most important feature in 2.0 that developers should be experimenting with and exploiting as soon as they get their hands on it? What features in 2.0 *directly* address...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I wrote a while ago about problems with the way DateTime worked with features like DataSet, XML Serialization (WebServices) and XmlConvert. Basically, DateTime is always treated as a local time by these XML-based systems, which means that you get incorrect...

In response to the query for input on what to blog about today, David asked the following question: "I want to know the big picture on things. What is the vision here? The end game?" This is one of those questions where you'll get a slightly different...

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 CLR team would love to meet any interested parties who are in the Seattle area, to chat about Whidbey, problems you’re having in V1.1, or if you’re simply interested in meeting some of the people who work on the CLR. We’ll be looking to do this next...

I recently gave a talk on CodeDom for compiler writers , and I thought I would adapt some of those slides here as a basic intro to CodeDom. CodeDom, or Code Document Object Model, is a feature which lets you generate code and assemblies in a language...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

It is been a while sense I posted in the series sharing some of the information in the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol 1 . Given today is BCL blog day, I thought I would kick it off by adding a couple of annotations from the System...

I posted a while back on a job opening for a BCL PM position. We got a lot of great candidates in response to that post, and it was quite exciting to see the range of experience and backgrounds in the people who responded. Now if you ever show interest...