GrantRi's WebLog [MS]

Daniel Moth questioned the move from source attribute to project properties. Here's my insight on 2 of the reasons. First the disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. The content of this posting contains...

Well, my house is half torn apart and the new parts are about half-built. There's not much to talk about here at work, as we're busy finishing off the last few bugs and getting everything up to snuff. The question in my mind is which will finish first...

I just finished signing the final paperwork to begin remodeling our home. Along with the paperwork came a fairly large budget. What strikes me as interesting is that it actually costs more to add on to a house than it does to build things from scratch...

So a while back somebody asked what new compiler features were coming out for Whidbey that weren't part of new language features. Well you've already heard about Edit and Continue . There's also the really cool Refactoring built into the IDE and built...

OK, this isn't a really meaty post, it's more of a collection of a few ideas that have been rattling around in my head for a while. I kept hoping they'd develop into something bigger, or I'd have time to research/investigate them more, but nothings happened...

Disclaimer: These are all my opinions, so don't take them to mean anything more than the futile thoughts of an insignificant bystander who happened to be fortunate enough to listen to a few of the C# language design meetings and occasionally interact...

Another Microsoftie, Josh Williams follows my blogs and pointed out another case where a base address matters: NGEN. When you NGEN your assemblies, the new images are loaded at the same base address as the original binaries. As Josh pointed out to me...

Question from Wes Haggard: A while back I posted http://weblogs.asp.net/whaggard/archive/2004/10/12/241476.aspx about having a generic type inherit from Attribute. Do you know why this is prohibited in C#? My attempted response: I used to think it wasa...

Question from Eric Wilson: Could you do a post on what the settings on the Advanced Tab in Visual Studio.Net for C# projects are for and when you should use them? My lame response: I've only occasionally had to deal with the project-system guys that more...

First off I'm not a language lawyer, or an expert. I am only sharing some of the impressions I've gotten from working with the real language designers. Eric Wilson asked why C# doesn't allow you to call static methods using instance pointers . My answer...

In case you haven't noticed, I've run out of ideas to write about. I'm sure there's still a few things I know that I haven't explained, btu I can't remember them... If you've been dying to know something about the C# compiler, ALink, CLR file formats...

Finally I have something to write about! There's a new section on MSDN that is definitely worth reading: 64-Bit .NET Framework (http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/64bit/) Now you only need a new 64-bit machine and OS to try it out on....

How the OS Loader will force .Net v1.0/1.1 executables to run under WOW64 on a 64-Bit Machine (http://blogs.msdn.com/joshwil/archive/2004/10/15/243019.aspx) In General I think all of Josh's recent posts are worth a read. --Grant

So as part of professional development, I assume everybody uses some form of source code control and revision tracking. This allows multiple developers to work together, and also a way of tracking changes. Sometimes they're also used as a way of 'branching...

In my previous post The problem with being second , it seems like there was a lot of confusion. I'm going to attempt to clarify some of that. The heart of that post was meant to point out that people/developers don't always how close or far they are from...

Please don't start a flame war over this. It is meant as more of a Dilbert-style post with just the slightest bit of real technical content. 64-bit machines are twice as fast as 32-bit machines because they have more bits. Believe it or not there are...

First, hats off to the Mono team . I think they've done a great job at writing some great software, but also at proving that evil MS really does know how to produce a truly common language runtime that can be properly standardized and ported to other...

OK, a few days ago I asked about how you used anonymous methods . Thanks for the very few who responded. I'm hoping that more people have used them than chose to respond. Now it's time to ask about my other pet feature: Iterators. How an possibly more...

Personally I think the MS marketing team really did rop the ball. They we're so busy promoting .NET that when VC 7.0 (aka 2002) and VC 7.1 (2003) shipped they forgot to mention all the tons of cool purely-native improvements in the product. Well now in...

So now that Beta 1 has been out and fairly widely availible for a while, how do you use anonymous methods? When I was working on them I saw several contrived examples. I saw several that seemed more like abuses than legitimate uses. In my earlier posts...

It seems like a lot of the time we (as software developers) are forced to make trade-offs. Choosing between 2 algorithms that solve the same problem, but with different characteristics. Sometimes it's an easy choice: option #1 is O(1) and option #2 is...

Well, here I am finally getting back to this. In my previous post on resources, I glossed over one issue. Not all managed resources are exactly what they seem. Specifically at the metadata/compiler level, there is a table that simply points to the...

I've seen this come up in conversations a few times so I thought others might be interested in it too. First off, I think since the large majority of us use x86-based processors we forget that one day in our CS or EE class where they talked about alignment...

So many people have wondered why the C# compiler isn't smarter about some of it's command-line arguments. Here's a summary of the type of questions I hope to answer in this post: Why doesn't the C# compiler accept /reference:*.dll? Why doesn...

I intentionally left out the 'why' because only you as developer on your own product can decide why a given programming feature should or shouldn't be used. First the easy part: What Multi-file assemblies are simply assemblies that consist of more...