Performance counter categories come in one of two modes: single instance and multi-instance. If you want your category to be visible through WMI, it's important to know the difference. A single instance category has only one machine wide value for each...

With Whidbey Beta 1, we've done some performance optimizations for Streams & byte[]'s stored in .resources files. The optimizations for byte[]'s are the relatively obvious ones - don't use serialization, etc. The interesting change happened for MemoryStream...

We get an ongoing number of questions about formatting numbers in .NET. The documentation seems to be notoriously difficult to find. I thought I'd give a quick overview here, with a sample. First note for future reference: to find the write page in the...

I thought I'd make the Nullable specification available to everyone, for reference, and in order to allow you to ask any questions/issues. This is about to go through an ECMA review as well, so it should be interesting to see what their issues/comments...

A customer recently asked how to compare to see whether two paths refer to the same file, and he wanted to do this using a canonical path name. This turns out to be a non-trivial problem. Instead of talking about canonical path names which are somewhat...

In NT, System.IO.Ports.SerialStream synchronous Read()/Write() operations are done asynchronously. That is, for every Read() operation a BeginRead() is issued on a thread-pool thread and an immediate call to EndRead() waits for the operation to complete...

All, thought I would post some notes from a recent meeting we had with the WebData team. This is in relation to a Tree class they have created internally in their namespaces, and what we should consider doing with it. The reference to 'our redblack' tree...

Well all, I haven't posted for a couple of weeks, and I thought I would share some fun with you, from an exercise we're going through to clean up the libraries before we ship. Of course, we're pretty aggressive about ensuring that we get a bunch of clean...

Well, I realize that TechEd '05 is a while off yet, but we're sitting here right now in a planning session, and I realized what I really wanted to know was: what presentations do you, our customers, want to see the most at TechEd? Given that Whidbey will...

All, here is a new design guideline we've just added, targetted at resolving whether we should call things 'APINameEx', or 'APIName2', when the name has already been used, but the API can't be changed for breaking change reasons. I'd love any feedback...

Well its time for another curioddity. This one is pretty fun, there's a couple of good sidesteps involved. The following code is gong to write out 3 lines of code to the Console. Your tasks are to: 1: without running the code, write down what you think...

We discussed a problem with implementation of IEnumerable on Dictionary<K,V>. What type should IEnumerable.GetEnumerator().Current return? KeyValuePair<K,V> or DictionaryEntry? Same for ICollection.CopyTo. Instances of what type should be...

All, we have a Program Manager opportunity available on the BCL team, and welcome any interested individuals who meet the requirements of the following job description, to contact Kit George ( kitg@microsoft.com ) for further information. Come work on...

All, we're going to start publishing topics from our design meeting notes. Feel free to send general feedback on the item,or to me directly ( kitg@microsoft.com ). Here's a kick off on Collections: TrimToSize on collections . The basic issue here was...

Time for another interesting snippet, in which the code itself doesn't appear bad at first glance, but again: the coder seems to be making an assumption about the way they have constructed the code, which is incorrect. And in fact, it's not an appropriate...

Eden Li, an intern at Microsoft for the summer, has just completed and posted an update to the CodeDOM Test Suite , which is available for public download on the BCL MSDN site . This is an excellent update to the suite, and includes all the files necessary...

Just an announcement all: I'm giving a WebCast tomorrow on MSDN, on the topic of 'What's New In The CLR, 2.0'. This cast is similar to presentations I have given at both PDC and TechEd, and will highlight a variety of things the CLR has been working on...

A somewhat common problem when getting started with developing managed code and using our IO package is forgetting to close a Stream or a StreamWriter. Users who write code like this will be disappointed: void Foo() { StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter...

This week's Curioddity is a result of the way some things in the framework work. I think many of you are going to know the underlying issue here, so I'm going to make it a bit more obscure (not give too much help) to try to keep it interesting. I would...

Well, I thought I would start a series on interesting things in the framework, and see what people thought about things I find interesting or odd. I'd also love to know what other things you find odd ir interesting that don't happen to come up. For...

[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...

[Anthony Moore] Thanks very much to those who have posted feedback on this issue: http://weblogs.asp.net/bclteam/archive/2004/05/21/136918.aspx This reply to the feedback got quite lengthy, so I started a new entry on it. >> "You COULD...

[Anthony Moore] There was a change to Decimal class in V1.1 to preserve trailing zeros in the default foramtting. I thought this was well known, but we just recently got a customer support issue on it. Here is an entry that we will shortly add to the...

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...

I recently published a faq with details about how the framework approaches the concept of deprecation, and making APIs obsolete: http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/changeinfo/V2.0/obsoletefaq.aspx I'd love any feedback or questions you have related to...