Cyrus' Blather

Had a long talk with Renaud today about nullable types and the interesting ideas they've been pushing through the language. Specifically we've added a few nicities in teh compiler to make using nullable value types as easy as using the actual value type...

One of my best friends Fu-zu is visiting this week. We've been having a lot of fun, and thanks to her my credit card bill will be enormous this month. We stopped by the comic book shop around here to see what new/old/fascinating/underappreciated works...

It's definitely shower time. My clothes are starting to smell rather ripe. I'm tempted to just throw them out now that I have all the swag that I picked up at Tech-Ed. But somehow I don't think it will help my social agenda if my wardrobe contains lines...

I posted a earlier blog about wanting support for managed co-routines in the next version of VS. Interestingly enough, that didn't garner much interest. Instead, what seemed to pique people was the fact that i really don't use a debugger when developing...

I was reading the C# 2.0 language spec and trying to wrap my brain around the new support for System.Nullable<A> in the C# language. There are just a couple of parts that I keep running into and not quite getting. The first is the following set...

Sigh... Apperantly I have serious problems and I should be getting myself some help post haste :-). At least according to Steve and Gregg I do. They're two debugger devs and they gave me the following legitimate advice when I said I wanted to dable in...

Felt like upgrading my entertainment center today. Took off from work and went out to a local Magnolia Hi-Fi shop. Ended up getting the 43" Samsung HLN437w box: Unfortunately, my puny honda could not handle the load so I must wait for it to be delivered...

A while back I posted about my issues in C# when I was trying to write out an extensible collections API. From the high level perspective I wanted to provide useful concrete implementations of many structures that would solve most peoples needs...

The Seattle International Film Festival is going on right now and it's been playing some really interesting stuff. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get tickets for either Ghost in the Shell 2, or Hero. Oh well. However, there's an interesting movie being...

Local flavor story: Last night I got to see Captain Smartypants do a performance of their new CD Undercover . The entire performance was excellent. Amazing voices singing pieces that ranged from lough out load comedy (an acapella rendition of Sir Mix...

Last night i got a chance to see the new son james of one of my friends from school and work. He's all of 4 days old, but he's completely adorable and i wish the entire family a wonderful future. I thought that while I was on the topic of cute, adorable...

I just stopped over at Amazon to order the dvd collection of Sports Night based on the feedback I was getting after talking about West Wing. I was about to add it to my shopping cart when what did I notive below? The option to get this and the first season...

Many people were intrigued at Tech-Ed when Anders revealed the deep language integration we were giving to the new System.Nullable<A> type. I could go more in depth into how it works, but for now I'll just to briefly explain it. Nullable<A>...

Neil (begin lisp (an awesome MS intern (who always gets to work on amazing projects (lucky bastard)))) has been letting me watch his season 2 DVDs of The West Wing. My favorite episode 'Noel' is on right now. It's an amazing episode and i've loved it...

Another interesting issue came up today with a C# IDE feature. It involved the following piece of code: interface IFoo<T> { void Bar<U>(U u) where U : T } class MyFoo : IFoo<int> { } We have a feature called "implement...

An interesting issue came up today that many people on the C# team had a passionate discussion about. It was about the following code: class C<T> { void M(T t) { t.ToString(); Console.WriteLine(t.ToString()); } } Where the user...

We got the results of the user feedback about the Tech-Ed session on C# IDE enhancements. The session was run was run by Joe and Anson and was the ranked the 3rd best session by the attendies. The 1st and 2nd best were the pair of talks by Scott Guthrie...

I love SharpReader and it's fantastic system of showing you a threaded view of posts/responses/referrers. Is there anything like that available for OSX?

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...