I needed WinDiff.exe recently on my laptop where I am dogfooding VS Express… So I needed to download it. In case anyone else needs it, WinDiff and some other cool tools are available here: Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools

I love the word “experiment” – it gives you lots of latitude to try crazy ideas… Well, a few weeks ago one of the Channel9 guys, Charles Torre , came to me with an interesting idea. He had been actively following an enormous thread I started and he really...

I remember reading about a website that helps folks track long term bets… such as: “In five years no OEM will be selling PCs with 32 bit processors (they will all be 64bit processors)” Or “In 20 years 90% of new cars in the US will use fuel cells” You...

Ever sense I blogged some of the material about designing good libraries for the .NET Framework and got such great feedback from you folks, I have wanted to get more of the material out there. Well, we are just about there. As Joe says we had the last...

Some good comments on my recent quiz . Many of you are hitting on the right thing… The answer is no, this will not compile as is. This is because in V2.0 we added a new constructor to Thread that allows you to pass a ParameterizedThreadStart delegate...

A recent internal thread and a little nudge inspired me to offer this little quiz to keep the old grey matter working over the holiday break. In V2.0, does this code compile? If not why not and how would you fix it? Obviously the quiz is a little more...

I am super excited about the fact that generics will be CLS complaint for Whidbey … With this change generics are now completely first class in Whidbey… It means that the frameworks Microsoft and 3 rd parties produce can full leverage this new feature...

We had a recent thread internally that resulted in me updating the guidelines below… Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Do provide overloads for methods with optional arguments. If a method takes some arguments that are not required...

Someone recently forwarded me an interesting paper from the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference that compares the CLR security model with Java’s… I thought it was an interesting read so I thought I’d share it with you. .NET Security: Lessons...

Joe has a little quiz about Close() and Dispose() Trivia: Should you call Close() and/or Dispose() on a Stream?

I’d like to thank Sean Chase for his comments on the SLAR up on Amazon.. As you saw from my previous post , I am in the middle of finishing up vol2, so now is a great time to get good and constructive feedback on Vol1. Please feel free to drop me a line...

I love seeing managed code branch out into new areas… we can make more developers productive with each new area. Today I learned that Oracle developers will start getting more productive. Oracle Introduces Oracle(R) Database 10g Release 2 -- Improved...

One of the PMs on the CLR team is gathering a list of the best CLR content on the web. The idea is to pool it altogether in a single spot to make it easier for folks to find the best stuff. Things such as blogs, tools, samples, books, etc. Basically anything...

Tonight I spent some time reviewing the latest batch of sample code for Volume 2 of the SLAR . As you may recall, Volume 2 covers System.Xml, System.Net, System.Reflection namespaces (among others). I really want every type and nearly every member in...

Some recently pointed out to me that Compuware offers a product to help enforce the .NET Design Guidelines naming conventions. Has anyone tried it out? http://www.compuware.com/products/devpartner/studio.htm

Another new guideline.. this one sparked a lot of discussion during our internal review, lets see if I cleaned it up well enough or not ;-) Do put cleanup code in finally blocks. Even code that immediately follows a catch() can be interrupted by an asynchronous...

Very cool! Common Larceny is a CLI-targeted implementation of the Scheme programming language. The compiler generates MSIL and is interoperable with other .NET languages. The Common Larceny project is directed by Dr. Will Clinger in partnership with Dr...

More guideline updates from the Security push (as Soma said earlier this year , the push is now upon us!) Do be aware that mutable values may have changed after they were validated. If the operation is security sensitive you are encouraged to make a copy...