Recently, somebody asked me why IComparable<T> does not extend IEquatable<T>. Here is this piece of history. When we were designing IComparer<T> and IEqualityComparer<T>, we observed that these two interfaces are rarely ...

Someone asked me why you cannot pass in the non-generic IComparer to a generic collection (something like List<T>). Particularly, if a programmer using the .NET 2.0 framework and generic List (aka List<T>) is unable to pass custom legacy ...

General Timer Background Information The System.Timers.Timer class provides a convenient way for .NET programmers to create a timer thread that fires events after elapsed time intervals. For more details on using System.Timers.Timer please refer to...

Bringing it all together Ok, that’s it for the explanation – let’s see how to actually run all this and watch it work. Here are the steps to follow: 1.) Create a simple service that we want to install 2.) Create a ProjectInstaller class specifying...

What happened to specifying a custom name? Ahh, I haven’t forgotten – this post was created to see how to let the user choose their own custom service name. Notice how I’ve hooked up two eventhandlers in my Project Installer code. BeforeInstall gets...

The Installer class Now that we have our simple service to install, let’s take a look at how we can install it. Custom installers in the .NET Framework all derive from the Installer class. There are several methods that you can override in this...

An interesting customer question came to my attention a few weeks ago. The customer had created a managed service, and was installing it with a custom name that was provided at install time by the user. I’ve seen several customer applications that do...

Krzysztof Cwalina and Kathy Kam are two BCL Program Managers that also have their own blogs. Krzysztof recently wrote about extending System.Diagnostics tracing APIs in the April Issue of MSDN Magazine . Kathy recently wrote an introduction to format...

Today CLR reveals certain key gc, threadpool events via ETW but nothing interesting besides that. If we were to design a larger scale instrumentation, - What kind of information/events you would like to see? - What kind of higher level bucketing...

The Forms Designer in Visual Studio 2005 takes away a lot of the drudgery of GUI development. All you do is drag and drop the components you need onto a panel, arrange them where you want them, and VS will generate the code to initialize them automatically;...

A customer asked me why we decided to make the members on our generic collection non virtual when every member on the non generic collections was virtual. I though other might be interested in this so I decided to answer it here. When we shipped...

The BCL team is starting to plan our next release. Is there any base API that if you’d heard we were working on you’d say “I can’t wait to get the next version of the Framework”? Any basic data structures? Any Win32 functionality that we don’t currently...

The single most requested individual feature for the Base Class Libraries that has not been delivered yet is for support for Time Zones other than Local and UTC. This is a feature we are actively exploring for the next release of the .NET Framework. ...

We’ve taken a break on blogging since shipping Whidbey. As our team is gearing up for Orcas, we decided that it’s time that we blog again and engage our community. If you have a particular topic that you want to see or hear about, let us know. We are...