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...

Many people ask about why Collection, ReadOnlyCollection, and KeyedCollection were moved to System.Collections.ObjectModel namespace. You can read the reasoning here .

.NET managed services are based on NT services, and both need to know how to interact with the ServiceControlManager (SCM) to remain responsive. For managed services, many of the complexities of interacting with the SCM are handled for you by System.ServiceProcess...

In my Introduction to Code Contracts post, I mentioned that the tools to enable runtime checking and static analysis were not included in the .NET Framework 4.0 CTP. Today we are releasing a preview version of the Code Contracts tools on the DevLabs...

Recently, I have heard a number of requests for the addition of a Set<T> class to the System.Collection.Generic namespace. Basic implementation of this class that implements only ICollection<T> would cover all the etremely vital operations...

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...

Thanks a lot for your great feedback! Two months ago, we shipped a NuGet package with support for immutable collections . We’ve also talked about it on Channel 9 . Since then we received feedback through various channels and we’re happy...

Blog Kick-Off with a TryParse Sample...

First, I’d like to thank everybody for their comments on the Zip APIs. It’s great to know that I’m working on something that a lot of people will hopefully find useful. I’ll try to address the themes that came up in the comments. Streams A lot of the...

SafeHandle is the preferred mechanism for controlling the lifetime of an OS resource (such as a handle to a file, semaphore, or block of memory*) and guaranteeing that the resource is eventually freed. Using some advanced reliability features (ie, constrained...

If you’ve installed the .NET Framework 4.5 RC, you may have noticed some differences between this prerelease and the .NET Framework 4.5 Beta. One of the changes we made was to move two libraries to an independent distribution model via NuGet . ...

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...

[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...

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...

This post discusses features in the preview version of MEF, and some details may change between now and the full release.

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There were very few noticeable changes between the V1.0 and the V1.1 release. One change that people sometimes notice is that Decimal looks different across the two versions. The changes are largely cosmetic, although in some rare cases applications have...

A heads-up all. The BCL has a chance next week to provide some added value, and we thought we'd keep as the focus, making a number of blog entries and samples. We'll hopefully see a great range of topics pour forth from this blog next Tuesday, so keep...

We are very excited to announce a planned release of a really exciting new product.

The Base Class Libraries team, the wider CLR team and Microsoft Research worked hard on this new technology and we are very proud to be able to share the news. Read the full article for details.

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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...

Useful resources for porting existing .NET code to Metro style apps.

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It is been a while sense I posted in the series sharing some of the information in the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol 1 . Given today is BCL blog day, I thought I would kick it off by adding a couple of annotations from the System...

If I were a Microsoft executive I would probably introduce this post with “I’m super excited to announce…” but I’m not. I’m just an engineer. Well, an incredibly proud engineer nonetheless. In any case, I’m proudly...

I decided to have a little fun with one of the new Console features. I wrote a quick program that will load a text file containing a series of {freqeuency, duration} pairs and play it using Console.Beep(). The program loads the integer data into a Song...

There’s been a number of questions about Nullable performance: is doing a HasValue check performant? Here's some code which we think better mimics what your old code (scenario 1 and 2) would have looked like, vs. what we suggest you do now. Assuming in...

[Anthony Moore] A colleage of mine from another team, Dan Rogers, has written an excellent article on the best way to use the DateTime class, and to deal with problems like time zones and Daylight Savings Time. He has let us post it on our site: ...