Continuing examining new types in Whidbey… My goal is to motivate why we added Whidbey features through simple little quizzes. For today, let’s say you have several arrays of ints and you want to sum different sub ranges from each one (that is, a different...

Krzysztof is asking for your feedback on some changes we are considering for the generic collections interface… Please join in the conversation… IComaprer & IComparable Refactoring Proposal

Well, lots of good responses … I can see this is going to be a hard group to stump. Nat nailed all the points quickly, even if it took him two posts to do it ;-)… there were several other great responses as well. Here is the code I came up with… I wanted...

I have made it my mission to institutionalize the value good API design. I strongly believe that this is key to making developers more productive and happy on our platform. One very small way to measure that success is to notice where 3 rd parties have...

Rico has some good tips particularly for people building low level managed libraries… worth a read. I see the mono guys already picked it up , I wanted to make sure others saw it as well...

Thinking about my last little quiz , I realize there are thousands (literally) of new methods across the framework in Whidbey. How better to introduce\explain them than illustrating the problem they are intended to fix.. Let’s say you had this code: string...

I will be doing some college recruiting at Washington University in Saint Louis Nov 8 th and 9 th . I already have a talk on campus on the 9 th (I will post more details on that when I get them) but if there is a local user’s group that would like a sneak...

Well, you folks were a lot quicker than I was… Steve got basically what I was looking for very quickly after I posted... Ben’s answer (to add his own local Exception class) was cute, but was clearly cheating as I did say no new classes… What I was looking...

Yesterday I heard about a cool Whidbey feature that inspired me to come up with this little quiz. The code below when run will print out: In try In catch After try..catch class Program { static void Main ( string [] args) { try { Console .WriteLine( ...

Continuing in the series on sharing some of the information in the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol 1 here is an annotation from the System.Byte class. Boy, was this ever a controversial point when we first started the framework...

I ran across the great quote on shipping software from my boss… I thought you folks might enjoy it.. Shipping is never easy, but always fun, kind of like bull ridding, you wonder why you got on in the first place, sometimes get hurt, but always remember...

Well, that was a fun little quiz… I should have added “no scoping tricks” to the list of rules, but what Roy Osherove suggested does work. But Kevin Dente gives the answer I was looking for. Whenever you see something funny going on in the framework 9...

“ B rad Abrams' .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference should be on every .NET developer's bookshelf, regardless of the type of .NET development you're doing ” and I didn’t even pay him ;-) Read the full review here: .NET Reference for Every...

I got this one from a reader down under… I gotta say, it pretty much had me stumped, so I thought I’d share it with you… Compile the following code and you get this error message: Cannot create an instance of the abstract class or interface 'IFoo' interface...

I just noticed that the ServerSide has a good interview with Brian Harry who was a founding member of the CLR team. He has some good thoughts on the history of the CLR and our core value adds… and Oh, yea, he talks about Team System as well ;-) Brian...

You are likely familiar with this error message: Program.cs(969,9): warning CS0618: System.Collections.CaseInsensitiveHashCodeProvider' is obsolete: 'Please use StringComparer instead You get it when you use a Type or member in the Framework that we have...

namespace Microsoft.CSharp { [Obsolete( "Use Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider, System.CodeDom.Compiler.ICodeCompiler, and System.CodeDom.Compiler.CompilerError instead. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=14202" )] public class Compiler { } [Obsolete...

Well – quite a good discussion . This is one of the reasons I love blogs. I really learned something today based on your feedback and we made a change to the product because of it . So thanks for your feedback. As many of you said, C1 and C2 result in...

A dev on the team recently found a bug in Whidbey a long these lines… Say you want to initialize the value of a static int to zero… which code should you use (C1 or C2) and, of course the most important point, why? class C1 { private static int value...

Someone recently asked me how I do the color coding of source code in my blog. Well, it is really very simple. I do my work in VS 2005 Express and then cut and paste it into word (an email actually), then cut and paste that into a blog entry… and presto...

Hello… my name in Brad Abrams and I have a confession to make: I could not get my home wireless network to work. I know the shame of it… I work at the largest software company in the word, the same software company that makes the OS my wife and I are...

Someone recently asked me to update an old post of mine Reflection and Generics . You gotta be careful what you write in blogs as they seem to live forever. Well, it is true, this needs a little updating. We no longer use the NewConstraintAttribute (or...

We have seen this come up a more than a few times in WinFX API reviews so I thought it was worth adding a quick guideline… As always, please let me know if you have any questions or comments. You can check out the base design guidelines and my incremental...

Given the code below, what is the result of the “Direct call” line and the “call via a delegate” lines? And, of course, why? For a little sport, try it without compiling the code first. public delegate void Callback (); class Program { static void Main...

Just saw a mail over an internal alias showing off how to find out if the currently logged on user is an admin… we make this reasonably easy in Whidbey. using System; using System.Security.Principal; class Test { public static void Main () { if ( new...