Aug 7 was my last working day at Microsoft. I am on vacation now and will officially end my employment at MS on Aug 23. This means that there won't be any more Visual Studio blogs from me, unless I write one influenced by separation pangs. It has been...

I have been reading several websites' coverage of Bill Gates' announcement to step down from the Chief Software Architect role in 2008. Most have focused on its impact on Microsoft, the technology industry, Wall Street and global health care (which stands...

Microsoft provides source access to some customers via its Code Center Premium (CCP) program. Not many people are aware that Visual Studio 2005 has integrated CCP support. It is true! While debugging applications in VS you can download sources for...

We keep receiving questions about Visual Studio 2005's support for 64-bit. Here is a set of factoids that should help answer the most commonly enquired issues: (a) There are two flavours of 64-bit - AMD64 or X64, and IA64. Windows 64-bit installs on...

It has been a while since I blogged. One reason is that not much is going on. Of course, at Microsoft that is a deceptive statement. By "not much" I mean that not much immediately impacting the customer is going on. We released VS 2005 and are starting...

Hi! A customer emailed me with the feedback that my sample code with C++ Exe calling C# Dll does not build with VS 2003. I investigated; the reason is that in VS 2003 the tlb exposes the namespace in lowercase as csdll instead of CSDll. The fix...

Hi! The Debugger team is having a Chat this Thursday (Dec 15) from 1:00 to 2:00 Pacific Time. If you have any problems with the debugger, this would be a great opportunity to ask questions and get live responses. The Chat homepage is http://msdn...

Hi! Recently, downloading symbols for microsoft shipped binaries using the Microsoft symbol server ( http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols ) broke for Visual Studio 2003 users. Microsoft has disabled downloading symbols using older versions of...

In VS 2003 & earlier breakpoints were bound based only on file name, so if the project system found another file with the same name we would bind the bp there. This was a source of a lot of annoyances since files like Class1.cs are everywhere, so...

Interop - calling native (C++) code from managed (C#, VB, J#, MC++) and vice versa - can be very useful if you are trying to extend your libraries without porting existing code. However, it can often be confusing for a newbie to figure out how to set...

Many people have used and liked the new visualizers in Whidbey. They really are a powerful data viewing tool, especially with the functionality of supporting custom visualizers. While the help documentation for writing your own visualizers is getting...

Daniel Spalding, our Dev Lead in the VC++ linker team, retired last friday after 18 yrs at Microsoft. In a sense it is an end of an era since he has been around, like, forever, and it is difficult to visualize a linker team w/o him. Dan was one of the...

Scott & I finished our "Inline Version Control" add-in for the app week, and I think for a week's work we did a fairly good job. I was rather surprised and impressed with the apps other teams came up with, and we are going to know the best app in...

One bloggable event happening right now is that we in the C# PU are once again planning an App Week. For those who are not aware, an app week is where we get together, form teams, and develop customer scenario applications with our product to find bugs...

One of my goals for this year has been to post regular blogs. The problem I keep running into is thinking up topics to post that are not an insult to your intelligence - e.g. describing stuff that is already mentioned in MSDN, and that, if you have taken...

A person emailed me requesting me to blog step by step instructions on how to get Asp .Net working on XP SP2, and to check the status for each step. I thought this would be a lengthy blog, but on second thoughts realize there isn't anything very deep...

As one of the Internationalization representatives, it is my responsibility to make sure that our automation framework code uses ToUpper() & ToLower() correctly. In almost all cases this does not matter and therefore people don't bother to remember...

Oh boy, I wanted to fix some automation bugs today, but could not as I had to update my "commitments" for my performance review. And I need to go home and do my laundry. Reviews at MS have changed as we officially become a "large company". Earlier we...

So I get this email from a guy on the Windows security team, they are looking for more people and this email was to existing MS employees enquiring if they wanted to move to the team. What I liked about this particular headhunting was that instead of...

The security hardening in SP2 affects remote debugging since the firewall blocks machine to machine communication. We have a workaround posted at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5BLN%5D;833977#2020 that lets you configure your machine...

Finally, after some pretty exciting last minute drama with the CD's, the VS 2005 Beta is released! I hope you like the new features we have in the debugger, and I hope you like its stability. Two of the features I enjoy owning are the new datatips...

The newsgroups give us a good idea of which debugger features are causing the most problems for our users, but it is more difficult to gauge which features our users are using the most. I am guessing Breakpoints/Watch would probably be the at the top...

Hi! I am Deeptanshu Verma, I am a QA in the debugger team, also involved with Internationalization work. I have at different times owned pretty much every non-script feature in the debugger in my 4+ years here at MS. Outside of work I enjoy reading...