Those of you who are already using Silverlight 1.1 Alpha may have seen that the familiar non-generic collections were all marked as obsolete. This includes almost everything under the System.Collections namespace. You shouldn’t be too surprised. We...

As you know generics were only introduced to the .NET Framework in version 2.0. Originally we had a lot of collections in the System.Collections namespace that can store objects. In version 2.0 we added the System.Collections.Generic namespace to support...

For the .NET 3.5 release, the BCL team has been trying to solve some problems related to dates, times and time zones that customers having been asking us to address for some time. We’ve invested in two significant features: TimeZoneInfo : Extended...

One thing we haven't publicized much on this blog yet is a new date time structure we've added in .NET 3.5 called DateTimeOffset (currently available as part of .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1 ). Kathy mentioned it on her blog a while back and Daniel...

DateTime. ToUniversalTime converts the value of the current DateTime object to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). When the converted value is either too large or too small to fit into a DateTime object then MaxValue or MinValue is returned, respectively...

System.TimeZoneInfo (currently available as part of .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1 ) contains methods for checking if a DateTime instance represents an ambiguous or invalid time in a specific time zone. These methods are particularly useful for validating...

The main feature of the System.TimeZoneInfo class (previously named System.TimeZone2 in CTPs prior to .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1 ) is to enable .NET developers to seamlessly work with Windows time zones in their applications. This includes enabling .NET...

System.String contains the static methods ‘Compare’ and ‘Equals’ which are used for string comparison. public static int Compare( string strA, string strB) public static bool Equals( string a, string b) These two methods perform two very different...

So here is another BCL refresher on the topic of floating point types in the BCL. Believe it or not, we have 3 different floating point types: Single (float) Double and Decimal. Each has their own characteristics and abilities and so let’s try to learn...

Developers using System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex with the RegexOptions.Compiled flag may notice performance degradation in their 2.0 apps when running on 64-Bit .NET Framework 2.0 . The performance problem occurs in the Regex(String pattern, RegexOptions...

We often get asked about the capabilities of the .NET compression classes in System.IO.Compression. I'd like to clarify what they currently support and mention some partial workarounds for formats that aren't supported. The .NET compression libraries...

Linq is one of the many .NET features we're pleased to include in the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha release . Linq in Silverlight supports key Linq-to-Object scenarios available in the desktop version, such as queries built on IEnumerable and the ability to implement...

Today at MIX07 we announced the availability of Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight is supported...

Many people told me that they would like to see more blog entries. Not only about the new cool stuff that's coming but also about the old established stuff that's maybe a tad forgotten. So, with the BCL refresher series we're going to go back to talk...

I'm pleased to let you all know that Microsoft released the first beta version of the next version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team System and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. This of course also includes the next version of the .NET Framework...

The Visual Basic team has put together a "Live from Redmond" webcast series aimed at the next version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio code named "Orcas". The live series starts April 18th and will continue to the end of May. It looks like the focus...

For now, our suggested workaround for users that encounter the MAX_PATH issue is to rearrange directories so that the names are shorter. This may sound like a cop out, but this is ultimately easier on users because of (1) limited tool support (i.e. Explorer...

TraceListener is an abstract class representing a listener object that is used to log event that a TraceSource is producing. In .NET 2.0 we have a few existing implementations such as ConsoleTraceListener for logging events to the standard console and...

Let’s start by looking at one of the more interesting exception messages in the BCL, the PathTooLongException: [PathTooLongException]: The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters...

Update : BigInteger was cut from the .NET 3.5 release . Have you ever needed a really huge number? So big it just couldn't fit into any other base-type in the framework? Well, no problem anymore, just use the new BigInteger type. You can now have the...

The Orcas January Community Technology Preview (CTP) has been publicly released as of Wednesday evening! This CTP is available as a Virtual PC image or as a self-extracting install . We advise against installing the self-extracting install on a production...

The Orcas October Community Technology Preview (CTP) includes new types that make it easy for developers to use pipes from managed code. Pipes are used for inter-process communication (IPC) between processes running on the same machine, or processes running...

HashSet<T> is in our latest CTP, and you can find it in the System.Collections.Generic namespace. The naming discussion over the last month has motivated me to recap some naming highlights for HashSet, so hang in til the end if you’re interested...

The Orcas October CTP became available for download earlier this week. This CTP contains a couple new features from the BCL team: A new high performance set collection. HashSet is a new generic collection that has been added to the System.Collections...

As one of the newest members of the BCL team, I wanted to take some time to introduce myself. I’m Matt Ellis and I’m the newest software design engineer on the team. Right now some of you might be experiencing déjà vu , since only a few months ago I was...