Cyrus' Blather

Ok, for the past two weeks I've come back to my computer only to notice that HelpSvc.exe is taking up 100% of one CPU and System is taking up about 60% of another. I'm not the only one who had this happen to him. Kevin has the same problem but he got...

I got NUnit to run by telling VS to copy the NUnit.Framework dll locally. However, when i tried starting nunit i got the following exception: --------------------------- Exception Details --------------------------- System.BadImageFormatException:...

I'm at a Tech-Ed cabana session entitled "VB.Net vs. C# for Office development with Visual Studio .NET". It's going over a few reasons why it's nicer to use VB for developing for office. The first version that is mentioned is that many methods in...

I'm watching the current Tech-Ed session on the new additions to the debugger to help simplify understanding what's going on when debugging complicated applications/structures. Everything was going great, and then BOOM VS fell flat on it's face. Not...

NUnit install seemed to go off without a hitch. But when i try having it open my dll i get the following exception: --------------------------- Exception Details --------------------------- System.IO.FileNotFoundException: File or assembly name nunit...

There's a fairly common industry term that gets used at MS a lot. It's called Eat your own dog food (or dog fooding for short). I've heard that the term arose when a dog food producer was trying to convince stores to sell its product. Iin order to so...

I had an attendee come up to me today asking if they could talk to someone from VS-Core. 'Core' is the name that we use for the team that is responsible for the VS infrastructure that is shared amongst all languages. An example of this would be the editor...

Turns out there's another way that VB tends to make Office development nicer. And that's because office uses late binding in a few places (dialogs were mentioned as one of those places). So in VB you could type something like: Dim dialog as OfficeDialog...

Scott brought up an interesting idea for how completion lists could work: He says: "ArrayList someList = new I would expect "ArrayList" to pop-up in a list, already highlighted, and any other known sub/supertypes of ArrayList to be close...

Rick, a member on on the C# team responded in the feedback section of another post. It was interesting enough that I thought i'd bring it up as a post. He wrote: --- Hi all, I'm a usability engineer that's been working on Visual Studio for...

Charles Miller wrote one of the funniest analogies I've ever seen comparing Apple/MS/Linux. I couldn't have said it any better.

The C# team has a FAQ where you can ask questions and have the answers posted for all to read in the future. I bring it up because someone asked on an internal list the question (in a nutshell) "Why can't you have generic properties?" I believe...

That's basically the message we got today concerning the work we're doing in the C# IDE for VS 2005. I ended up not being able to show people the new stuff on a person by person basis because we ended up getting too much of a backlog of people while that...

I noticed a question on the C# faq by David who asks: --- Is it possible when you type {, (, [, etc. to have the IDE automatically insert the corresponding }, ), ] etc.? Does this exist in VS.NET 2003? Am I just blind? Would it be possible...

One of the refactorings we're including in C# 2.0 is "reorder parameters." Strangely enough, it doesn't do what you think it might do. Wait... nevermind. It does exactly what you think it might do, it allows you to reorder the parameters in a signature...

Look at these stats: On Tuesday mine was the only PowerBook that I could see here On Wednesday I saw another Today I saw two more That's exponential growth right there. I also think with the people leaving Tech-Ed the number of Windows...

Someone took my pic at tech-ed and put it up for all the world to see. That's really not what I look like. I actually look like this:

Or, in this case, the lack thereof. It sucks when you've coded everything out in your mind and you're stuck waiting for your tools to catch up to you. My mind starts getting antsy and the amount of time it takes to do something simple balloons out endlessly...

Chris asks : Simple productivity question. Why doesn't C# intellisense expand enum values like VB.NET? I'm primarily a C# programmer, but I use VB.NET for some functions, and it's one thing I really miss. --- Chris, Visual C# 2005 now includes...

11,000 people sharing a 56k connection. 5,500 laptops, but only 2 power plugs.

I'm not sure if this is an issue for everybody, but battery life is a serious issue with me and my laptop. This is compounded by the facts that: The PowerBook's battery life isn't that great. About 3 hours max if i turn my screen brightness is...

I seem to be in some sort of state where if I ever touch this one file I trigger a complete rebuild of all our source. I'm in the middle of taking some of our core types and doing the dual job of making them Immutable objects Good const citizens...

Last post indicated a gotcha that can occur when reordering parameters in a signature. Here's one that can come up with Extract Method. Like the last example this one occurred during actual coding and it would have been prevented had I had these refactoring...

Installed the mono beta without a hitch. Had no idea where it ended up in (thank god for OSX HD indexing and searching). Eventually found it in /opt/local/bin (didn't even know that directory existed). Tried to compile some of my code and got: cyrusn...

Prelude: Here's what my current array based implementation of ICollection looks like. It builds upon a lot of suggestions as to the tradeoffs of perf vs. memory and uses delegates to place control in the person who creates the collection for how certain...