Calvin Hsia's WebLog

Use status events to log and analyze an application

CalvinH — Wed, 29 May 2013 20:11:03 GMT

Applications can get quite complex, with multiple components, assemblies, subsystems, etc. Understanding this complexity can be daunting. An old but still very effective way of analyzing code is to modify the code to output a string whenever that section...(read more)

Does the CLR release memory when no longer needed?

CalvinH — Wed, 01 May 2013 06:41:03 GMT

A colleague asked the other day if the CLR releases memory when it’s no longer needed. Suppose you allocate lots of memory, then release it. The CLR will grow the managed heap (the green below), but it will also shrink it if it can. All memory in a process...(read more)

Cartoon animation works great on Surface Pro

CalvinH — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 06:25:45 GMT

I showed my 9 year old son a cool drawing program called Physamajig , in which users can draw objects, which behave like real physical objects, including reacting to gravity, friction, and bounce. He was having fun with it on my Surface RT and it reminded...(read more)

The Visual Studio Feedback tool

CalvinH — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 01:38:17 GMT

Sometimes when you use Visual Studio, or any application on a computer, there’s a notable pause when you try to do something. For example, trying to access a file on a network share somewhere, perhaps on a slow connection, the application will...(read more)

Compiling code at runtime and MVP program is 20

CalvinH — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:27:23 GMT

This month marks the 20 th anniversary of the Microsoft MVP program, so MVPs were in the news. Apparently I had a lot to do with the founding of the program J Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Most_Valuable_Professional Microsoft News...(read more)

Windows Error Reporting and the Appdomain.UnhandledException Event

CalvinH — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:22:57 GMT

Sometimes applications fail. If you are the author and it fails on your machine, typically you fire up the code in a debugger, figure out the issue, fix it, and rebuild the code. If the applications is out in the wild, perhaps with millions of users,...(read more)

Create a logger for watching your test progress as it runs.

CalvinH — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 20:25:03 GMT

I was creating a project that’s a Windows Service, which has components running in multiple processes, using multiple threads and named pipes for communication. To understand the behavior of the code, I wanted to have accurate logging that: · The...(read more)

Turn your tests into stress tests easily

CalvinH — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 02:00:08 GMT

It’s great to be able to write tests and execute them while developing a project. While I’m developing, I can hit a button and run the dozens of tests to see if I’ve broken anything. As code gets written lots of things get refactored, moved around, etc...(read more)

Its easy to Create your own FrameWorkElement in WPF

CalvinH — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 01:51:35 GMT

Sometimes you want to have very fine control of how your application looks and behaves. Other times, you just want to draw something on your UI. It’s pretty easy to create your own control class and put instances of it on your form. The sample below create...(read more)

The number of Garbage Collections indicate how much memory is used

CalvinH — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:38:12 GMT

One of the performance improvements we made in .Net was with System.Text.StringBuilder . StringBuilder is used in lots of code to build strings: it has various methods to modify strings quickly. Once a string is built, the ToString method is called to...(read more)