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From time to time a company ships a product that has a huge impact on their ecosystem. A good example for us is certainly .NET. The biggest value proposition that managed code has is that it is, well, managed code. The CLR provides runtime management components such as a garbage collector or reflection...

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, though the initial size of the memory can be...

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 new field it will throw an exception the runtime...

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 exceptions . Happy reading.

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 where Peter Golde describes the project details ...

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 between language vendors and framework authors that...

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 Whidbey. For the sake of illustration, suppose in...

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. We’re curious to know which of these (if any) seem...

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, the Windows Service option is likely overlooked...

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 results if you use UTC or whole dates with them...

I was recently asked if there was a way to reallocate an object on top of another one, or to change the type of an object at runtime. This must have been a somewhat common practice in native C or C++ programs, perhaps something that C++'s placement new facilitated. I'm not a big fan of the idea in general...

When we were designing our generic collections classes, one of the things that bothered me was how to write a generic algorithm that would work on both arrays and collections. To drive generic programming, of course we must make arrays and generic collections as seamless as possible. It felt that there...

[Ahmed AbouTaleb] Here is a list of all the new BCL features that shipped in Visual studio 2005 Beta1 Regular Expressions We added the ability to use character class subtraction to regular expressions. The specification is publicly available here . Compression Support We have added...

I have recently created some new DateTime FAQ entries to address some questions people have about using DateTime on blogs. Our web site is in transition, so I'm posting some of these into the blog. However, they will eventually be rolled into the DateTime FAQ on the BCL web site. Why is DateTime not...

In a post to the BCL Website question page, nfactorial inquired if there is a timeline by which the BCL (and the .NET Framework in general) intends to have full support for unmanaged APIs? Nfactorial, we plan ot continue to expand the framework to have more and more managed solutions, and Longhorn...