Cyrus' Blather

I'm proud to tell you all about the availabilty *today* of C# Express for the insanely high price of $0. That's right. You can get streamlined and slick version of Visual Studio with complete support for C# editing, WinForms development and debugging...

Well, unless you've been living under a rock, you know that we finally signed off on VS 2005 and that it's available now (or soon) to MSDN subscribers. The "boxed" versions should be coming in just a few weeks, and i can't wait to see what you think about...

For all who missed it (like me), you can now see all the 2005 PDC sessions. They're available here: http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/ Usually these are available for a while (but not indefinitely), so grab 'em while they're hot. Obviously i...

So this is the start of a series of posts that will dive a little deeper into the new C# 3.0 features. My previous posts covered an overall view of what we were doing with the language as well as the Linq initiative, but didn't delve deep into the nitty...

FYI: There seems to be a problem with the blog software i'm using where i'm not getting notified about all posts that you guys are making. It's being actively investigated, and i'm hoping for a resolution soon. So if you're finding that i'm not responding...

In the last post i discussed a little bit of background on why we wanted to introduce Linq, as well as a bit of info on what some basic C# Linq looked like. In this post i'm going to dive in a little bit deeper to some other interesting things we're introducing...

I've been mulling over the best way to talk about the new C# 3.0 stuff we've been working on. I presented the post on how you could use the new C# 3.0 features to go beyond the basic query functionality we've been targetting it at. The was to help give...

If you've heard about the new C#/Linq work that got announced today, but don't know where to go to find it. Well, the awesome folks at MSDN have put up a great page that highlights what we're working on, as well as providing great links to our latest...

Can’t attend PDC but still want to talk to the C# team about what's coming up? This chat is your chance! Join the C# team to discuss the newly announced C# 3.0 features like: extension methods lambda expressions type inference anonymous...

The previous post ended up showing that while visitors are available in C#, they lack usability brought by built in language constructs they could have that would make them an ideal choice to solve our problem. In Java, we saw that anonymous inner classes...

So we left off on the previous post with the question of why we were using Java to work with our new token visitors. Can't visitors be used in C# as well? Well, yes. However, not necessarily as conveniently as with Java. How so? Well, let's take a look...

The previous post on this topic gave us a problem statement for us to look at. Specifically, how to design an internal structure that we want to be easily consumable from many different locations, while not weighing down the structure with any orthogonal...

One of the things we love doing around here is dicussing different design techniques for attacking problems in general and the work we do in specific. One of the very common conversations we have is simply how to structure internal data within the C#...

The PDC keynote is going to be in a few hours. And while i won't be there, i'm definitely going to be watching it live (to access it go here ). There's a lot i'm going to want to blog about at that point, but to help out my later posts i'm goign to start...

As many of you may know, we recently announced a pretty big change to the C# 2.0 language. The full details of the change can be found at Soma's blog but i'll include the information here. We designed the Nullable type to be the platform solution...

Here's a nifty little problem that a friend gave me yesterday that i thought i'd share with you: You have three items (call them 'a', 'b' and 'c') that you want to choose any one from without bias. If you had a fair three sided die, you could assign...

Ok class. Get out your pencils for another pop quiz. Without using anything beyond your mind, answer the following question: Consider the following code: public class A < T1 > { public T1 a; public class B < T2 > : A < T2 >...

I wanted to write a post today about a very interesting bug we just came across related to Refactoring. As i just blogged about verification, i thought that this would be a good followup. First, a bit of background. Referencing the previous post,...

A while back we got an MSDN feedback report about a crash a customer was experiencing. The customer had the following code: class A : B { } class B : A { } class C : B { override //Type space here } At this point the IDE would just up and...

PDC is coming up soon, and the session list has been posted. One thing i wanted to point out was the abstract for a session that the C# team will be giving on version 3.0 of the language: C#: Future Directions in Language Innovation from Anders...

Alright class. Pop quiz time. Say you have the following code: namespace What { class The { public static void Heck( uint [] array) { if ( typeof ( uint ) != array.GetValue(0).GetType()) { throw new PleaseExplainThisToMeException(); } } } } ...

I posted a blog post from JavaOne where i stated: "I did try out several of [Netbean's] refactorings, and was pleased with them for the most part. However, i tried a rename refactoring that changed the meaning of my code, and they did no verification...

Extremely interesting talk today about making a highly scalable VM for java that can handle a high number of threads far better than the current VMs out there. What's better than that? It runs your code better without requiring you to change any of...

Just got out of a fascinating talk with Mark Rheinhold and Gilad Bracha about future enhancements they see in the Java Programming Language. The talk started out with a very interesting discussion about the philiosophy of language design and how the...

Unfortunately, this is just a gripe and not an actual talk about something going on at JavaOne right now. When you pull up the JavaOne Session Catalog , ask for all the sessions in a single day, and then you sort by time, you get a list of sessions...