Something that a lot of people note with the Path class is that it has a method called 'GetInvalidPathChars', but the list doesn't return two key values which obviously, are not allowed to be used as part of file names: '*' and '?'. The reason is that...

Ahmed & I did a video presentation on System.Resources and how to use the ResourceManager for loading localized strings (and images, etc) in a globalized application. If you're new to using the ResourceManager, this should be a good high-level overview...

As you may have already heard, the November CTP of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition was posted for MSDN subscribers earlier this month. CTPs are unsupported, pre-release software - and also a great way to get an early look at what's coming down the...

Here is a new DateTim FAQ entry. What is the relationship between DateTime parsing and formatting and the time zone? Before reading below, see this entry for a more practical description of how to using formatting and parsing for the purposes of storing...

Buffer.BlockCopy has following signature: public static void BlockCopy(Array src, int srcOffset, Array dst, int dstOffset, int count); It copies count bytes from src , beginning at srcOffset , to dst , beginning at dstOffset . srcOffset is the byte offset...

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...

System.Diagnostics.Process class provides APIs to get lots of information about Process, but it doesn’t expose a few capabilities. For example, you can’t get information about the session id or the owner of a process. We will be exploring additional functionality...

http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/articles/273454.aspx

ArrayList is one of the most commonly used data structure. However there is little information about ArrayList performance characteristics on MSDN. The document on MSDN does mention asymptotic complexity of some methods on ArrayList class, but it doesn...

It is not an easy job to write a windows service in unmanaged. There are many guidelines you need to follow to make the service work. Programming Server-Side Applications for Microsoft Windows 2000 is good reference to learn how to write a windows service...

There's a fair bit written about using CodeDom, but samples showing how to implement your own provider have been quite thin on the ground . Fortunately Eden Li , a CLR intern this summer, produced a couple of useful CodeDom provider samples now live on...

When you redirect stdout of your consoleapp to a file, you can expect that a number of Console APIs won't work quite right. For ex, MoveBufferArea is an obvious candidate of something that can't be supported. In this situation you will get an IOException...

We happened to discuss the new naming guideline for generics today, and for whatever reason, or discussion turned to some of the more interesting, and amusing names that could be designed around the decision to use a named generic argument, preceeded...

Anthony Moore has updated the Numeric Types FAQ, and the Date and Time FAQ on our webiste. Check out the new FAQs at http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/bcl/FAQ/ . Note also that if you'd like to see questions answered in these FAQs, just...

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...

Array.IndexOf are “generic” methods to search for an item in an one dimensional array. However since they are generic, there are some performance caveats. Array.IndexOf handles arrays in three different ways: (1) If the array is a SZArray (one dimensional...

Clarifying the behavior of Path.GetDirectoryName. This is a convenient string parsing method to get the directory path of a file path. It validates neither the given file path nor the returned directory path. This method merely removes the last element...

I often get questions about Regex and what the RegexOptions.Compiled flag actually does. There are in fact three different modes that Regex can work in: interpreted (without the compiled flag), compiled on the fly (with the compiled flag), and precompiled...

Well, I wasn't prepared for the wealth of responses and I can tell you, we absolutely appreciate it. It's great to see a bit of passion around this kind of subject. Result : we're going to say the change is acceptable. We were already leaning towards...

Jay Roxe used to work on the BCL team as the dev lead, and has a lot of excellent historical knowledge about fundamental classes. He recently gave an interview on .NET Rocks , in which he discusses a wide variety of things, including touching on the internals...

So an interesting situation arose today I though I would share with everyone. I'd love your input on this issue as well, if you feel strongly one way or the other. Curiously, the C# compiler (at least) allows you to write the following code: public abstract...

So an interesting situation arose today I though I would share with everyone. I'd love your input on this issue as well, if you feel strongly one way or the other. Curiously, the C# compiler (at least) allows you to write the following code: public abstract...

Just wanted to quickly let you know the BCL job opening is still available. There's actually 2 or 3 openings within the CLR at the moment so if you're interested, let us know! Just ping me directly at kitg@microsoft.com , and we'll go from there. The...

The guidelines for the names of generic parameters have been updated. Read the new approach on Krys's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/kcwalina/archive/2004/11/03/251722.aspx

I recently came across a bug in FileStream’s internal buffer where the behavior is non-intuitive, so I thought I would discuss it. Filestream uses one internal buffer for both reading and writing (scary but memory efficient). Unfortunately, this means...