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...

Recently, somebody asked me why IComparable<T> does not extend IEquatable<T>. Here is this piece of history. When we were designing IComparer<T> and IEqualityComparer<T>, we observed that these two interfaces are rarely ...

Someone asked me why you cannot pass in the non-generic IComparer to a generic collection (something like List<T>). Particularly, if a programmer using the .NET 2.0 framework and generic List (aka List<T>) is unable to pass custom legacy ...

General Timer Background Information The System.Timers.Timer class provides a convenient way for .NET programmers to create a timer thread that fires events after elapsed time intervals. For more details on using System.Timers.Timer please refer to...

Bringing it all together Ok, that’s it for the explanation – let’s see how to actually run all this and watch it work. Here are the steps to follow: 1.) Create a simple service that we want to install 2.) Create a ProjectInstaller class specifying...

What happened to specifying a custom name? Ahh, I haven’t forgotten – this post was created to see how to let the user choose their own custom service name. Notice how I’ve hooked up two eventhandlers in my Project Installer code. BeforeInstall gets...

The Installer class Now that we have our simple service to install, let’s take a look at how we can install it. Custom installers in the .NET Framework all derive from the Installer class. There are several methods that you can override in this...

An interesting customer question came to my attention a few weeks ago. The customer had created a managed service, and was installing it with a custom name that was provided at install time by the user. I’ve seen several customer applications that do...

Krzysztof Cwalina and Kathy Kam are two BCL Program Managers that also have their own blogs. Krzysztof recently wrote about extending System.Diagnostics tracing APIs in the April Issue of MSDN Magazine . Kathy recently wrote an introduction to format...

Today CLR reveals certain key gc, threadpool events via ETW but nothing interesting besides that. If we were to design a larger scale instrumentation, - What kind of information/events you would like to see? - What kind of higher level bucketing...

The Forms Designer in Visual Studio 2005 takes away a lot of the drudgery of GUI development. All you do is drag and drop the components you need onto a panel, arrange them where you want them, and VS will generate the code to initialize them automatically;...

A customer asked me why we decided to make the members on our generic collection non virtual when every member on the non generic collections was virtual. I though other might be interested in this so I decided to answer it here. When we shipped...

The BCL team is starting to plan our next release. Is there any base API that if you’d heard we were working on you’d say “I can’t wait to get the next version of the Framework”? Any basic data structures? Any Win32 functionality that we don’t currently...

The single most requested individual feature for the Base Class Libraries that has not been delivered yet is for support for Time Zones other than Local and UTC. This is a feature we are actively exploring for the next release of the .NET Framework. ...

We’ve taken a break on blogging since shipping Whidbey. As our team is gearing up for Orcas, we decided that it’s time that we blog again and engage our community. If you have a particular topic that you want to see or hear about, let us know. We are...

After the release of a major product (i.e. Whidbey), opportunities frequently opens up on the team. This time, we have two open position in our User Experience team. It has been said many times that good and accurate documentation is priceless. Come help...