May, 2006

Monday was a holiday, so no one was around to post anything. :( Instead, I'll share this off-topic news with our readers. BCL just got our MSDN and GotDotNet page updated. MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/bcl/BCLTeam.aspx...

The SerialPort class uses the encoding specified by the SerialPort.Encoding property to convert strings and character arrays to bytes to send across the serial port. This encoding also gets used when reading from the serial port to convert bytes received...

System.Double and System.Single are have inexact precision of decimal digits because internally they are a floating point binary number. As such, beyond a certain number of significant digits, their decimal representation becomes approximate. The standard...

“Is the order returned by the List<T> enumerator guaranteed to be the same as looping through with a for loop?” Since foreach is actually defined in terms of looping over the ‘MoveNext’ operation of the enumerator, foreach is guaranteed to be...

I have seen a few customers complain that their DataReceived event handler was never getting called and I thought I would share their problems here so you can learn from their mistakes. The problems revolve around the port not being open. This is sometimes...

The test role at Microsoft generally and in the BCL team specifically is somewhat different from a traditional test position in the software industry. We release software for developers and the test team considers themselves as frontline developers that...

We’ve seen cases where our customers have run into issues when using a MemoryStream with GZip compression. The problem can be frustrating to debug and I thought I’ll blog about it in the hope that others would avoid a similar issue. The code for this...

One of the areas that I have been involved in for the past half year is application compatibility. Since then I have a number of emails from our .NET 2.0 compatibility alias ( netfxcmp@microsoft.com -let us know if you have any compat questions!) with...

Every so often, I run into code that requests security permissions that are not needed. Take the following code snippet as an example: // open the file for reading FileStream fs1 = new FileStream ( @"C:\Program Files\SomeFile.bin...

So the BCL thinking of implementing a set collection for a future release and we would like to get you our blog reading public opinion on what scenarios are important to you for a Set collection. The collection will likely have the standard ICollection<T>...

Some of our new users to managed code take a little time to get used to the design pattern in reading a file. I thought I’ll enumerate through the most common patterns for their benefit; Reading from a FileStream : Create a suitable buffer size...