Brad Abrams

Over the weekend some of the big-brains on the CLR team (oh, and me too) are having a debate about introducing the concept debug and retail builds of the .NET Framework. The high level concept is to move some “code correctness” checks out...

Ken Brubaker has a good compilation of new .NET Design Guidelines .. Thanks. At his suggestion I also added a new category to my blog where you can see just those new guidelines we have recently added. Enjoy.

A while back I posted some thoughts on Win32 signatures… The CLR interop team has been hard at work figuring out the right solution, expect to see more soon. In the mean time check out these PInvoke signatures the C# team posttest a while back....

In a previous post I asked I said that we throw a NullReferenceException when you try to access instance “state” (eg a field). What if you have an instance method that does not touch any instance state (for example an instance method that...

In my comments Pavel ask: How does the CLR decide if a given AV should be converted to a NullReferenceException or not? Jonathan Keljo the PM in charge of the CLR exception story tells me that in v1 and v1.1, all AV's, regardless of the target...

I could have said it better myself… thanks Wes . Empty Arrays

How embarrassing --- the CLSCompliantAttribute, which I was the PM for back in the day, does not follow the naming convention . A reader pointed this out nicely in my comments . All I can say is that this attribute has very heavy dependencies across ...

We had an internal thread about Setting Environment variables and someone posted a cool V1\V1.1 solution. One workaround is to use System.Management (WMI). This should work on all versions of .NET Framework with WMI installed on the OS. You would...

If you have done much managed development you have run into a NullReferenceException more times that you’d care to count. The CLR throws this exception when you try to access instance state on null instance… One of your internal customers...

In my comments Kevin Westhead asks about the Windows Forms FileDialog. I was able to speak to grandpuba of Windows Forms, Mark Boulter who explained this as recommend a fix to the documentation: FileDialog is a detail of the implementation of OpenFileDialog...

I got my plans worked out … See you there! Microsoft Tech Talk II Software Development and the Microsoft Common Language Runtime Given by Brad Abrams, a Microsoft Lead Program Manager Tuesday 2/24/04 6:00 PM, University Business Center...

The course abstract is at http://csce.unl.edu/~witty/sp2004/csce496/ , the Rotor bit is "...students will examine the actual implementation of these runtime systems. We will use Microsoft CLI engine which is the core runtime infrastructure for .NET platform...

Rico has some words for wisdom on how to (and not to) do performance analysis. Check it out: Bad Analysis Worse Than None

The BCL team is having some design discussions on how to fix a bug that was recently found. I thought you might want to chime in as some of the implications have wide applicability. Here is the thread from Anthony … comments welcome. ...

I actually got a chance to write a little WinFX code today, which was a lot of fun. But I did run across one issue that has been in the back of my mind for while. It is the “Is” prefix on Boolean properties. I started out by using the...

In my comments Jeff asks: I have a question, how was the decision for these 2 classes ctor parameters made... Constructor for ArgumentNullException public ArgumentNullException( string paramName, string message) Constructor for ArgumentException...

We keep getting lots of requests for serial port support in the .NET Framework. We are planning to have it in the next release of the .NET Framework. You can goto http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/clr/bcl/demos/demos.aspx , and check out the code in either...

Michal Cierniak talks about it here . Who all is going?

http://new.msdnaa.net/curriculum/repository.aspx Looks like some good stuff. Anyone using this stuff? Anyone want to go to a university where they are using this stuff ;-)

I just heared about http://www.techsoup.org . I am told non-profits can use this site to order MS software for “free”… although there seems to be some admin fees. Anyone using it? How do you like it?

In the comments of a recent post Frank Hileman suggests: I have seen, with acronyms, anything goes. I assumed there is no rule. We do have a rule and I believe it is reasonably well followed in the Framework. Do use PascalCasing or camelCasing...

Someone asked me this week for some best practices around deploying the .NET Framework on client machines. Unfortunately I don’t have a ton of experience with this. For the last big application I work on ( Terrarium ) we decided to simply...

There was an interesting thread this week inside the firewall about compatibility concerns the .NET Framework (and by extension WinFX) has in light of the fact that you can you use reflection to find and even invoke private members. Here is the exact...

If you have been following the Design Guidelines updates I have done and the Design Guidelines document you will notice we use a pattern…. Nearly every rule begins with “ Do ”, “ Do not ”, “ Avoid ” or “...

Ian has some good thoughts on naming conventions . I'll make sure the folks on the WinFX team hear this load and clear. I like this naming convention because it means that an important fact about the code leaps out at me.