GrantRi's WebLog [MS]

Sorry it took so long to get to part 2. First up is the unwind info (I think it's the .XDATA, but don't quote me). Basically there is a set of opcode sequences that are allowed in the prologue and epilogue, and there is some info in the describes what...

Anybody that done any programming on .NET has probably used some EH at least once or twice. It all seems pretty natural and straight forward. Well, I'm glad we can fool so many of you into thinking it's easy. What follows is a gross-over-simplification...

As I mentioned a few posts back, I was forced to upgrade my Pocket PC. I went with a new Dell Axim X30. I got the mid-range one with built-in WiFi, but a slower processor. My old one was a Casio E-200. I know some of this stuff has been around for a while...

Well in case you haven't noticed, I've run out of ideas for thigns to write about. This is you're queue to send me questions or suggestions. My best guess as to why I've run out of ideas is because of my recent change in jobs. I am no longer dealing...

I've noticed a lot of my links come from searches (primarily google). Is that because I'm actually answering a lot of releavant information that people want to know? Is it possibly because I happen to use all the magic keywords so that google pushes me...

NIH = Not Invented Here So here at Microsoft we have a lot of really smart people. Unfortunately that seems to lead to a lot of NIH syndrome. That really wouldn't be so bad if we had a broad enough definition of 'here'. For me as an individual developer...

Now that Whidbey features can be freely talked about, I can mention my personal not-directly-C# feature: netmodule linking. Basically due to some hard work by the C/C++ compiler and linker team, any tool that can produce managed netmodules(/target:module...

Well, I've been working on my new team for 4 weeks now. I've learned a lot about their process. I'm getting better at running tests and figuring out failures. I'm getting more familiar with the source base. I've learned little bits about optimizations...

So despite the misreably long time it takes to run checkin tests, I've still managed get 2 checkins through. The downside is that both of those checkins resulted in bugs. On the plus side one of those bugs technically wasn't caused by me, but was merely...

OK, so like 20 years ago (yes, I'm exaggerating a little) it was quite common to run across compiler bugs, where you needed to disable some optimization locally or globally to get your program to work correctly. I think that's mostly gone now, but there...

So I had a short email exchange with a collegue about iterators. He mentioned that I should put in in my blog. Seemed reasonable, so here it is: Subject: Iterator generated code ... I'm looking at porting a hand-coded enumerator to...

I wish we had more UE (User Education for those not familiar with Microsoft acronyms) interaction when writing error messages. Usually, it is just a one or more devs that try and write some English (but remember we're CS or EE majors, not English or communications...

So I'm getting ready to do my very first checkin. It's a nice trivial change to some of the debug-only dumping routines. I kicked off the checkin tests and asked how long they would take. Now some other bigger checkins have been going through 'Extended...

Well after 2 days, I've setup 2 new machines (one for email and one for development/building/debugging), built the runtime, installed it, and stepped through some code in the debugger. Can I just say that our new debugger and remote debugging components...

Almost 5 years ago, I started full time at my first real job. I came straight out of college with nothing more than a BS in Computer Science to work on the C# compiler. Yes, I'd done a few odd ball jobs programming here and there, but nothing with real...

Well after spending most of my professional life working on the C# compiler. I've decided it's time for a change. I've always been much more interested in the internals ofo stuff. GUIs are nice to use, but I've never really had the drive (or maybe it...

First off, I don't even pretend to have a good comprehension of how remoting works. What I do know is that right now the compiler generated classes derive directly from Object, and somehow this is bad for remoting, instead they should derive from MarshalByReferenceObject...

So a while back there was big news about some secret code in IE that used “Netscape engineers are weenies”. I only know what I read in the newspapers about this, and the fact that internally MS outlawed any and all 'Easter Eggs'. We were given...

I've seen a awful lot of comments lately about all the cool stuff that can be done with al.exe. I'd just like to point out that with very few exceptions csc.exe can do almost everything that al.exe can do. One of those exceptions deals with the /template...

So I've been thinking about this, and although it seems like CS101 to transform a recursive algorithm into an iterative one, and example might be worth while. The natural one to attack would be the generic binary tree traversal iterator. So here goes...

So most of you have figured out by now that making your application run with different languages can be very hard. The overall design is always the same: place all content that might change for different languages in some sort of runtime-selectable package...

It's a bright beautiful Friday afternoon and all I can think about is, “I wish it would rain so I don't have to water my new lawn.” On a different note, I just want to say I love working here at Microsoft. This morning we decided last minute...

So there is this little known tool that ships as part of the framework SDK. It is referred to as the assembly linker, but on disk it's called al.exe. I like to call it just ALink. So what's the point of a linker that doesn't really link? I'll tell you...

So here's a recent MSDN article that I actually had the chance of reviewing several months ago. They've done a much better job at capturing the good new stuff in C# than I could ever do. http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/default.aspx?pull=/msdnmag...

It's not documented very well, but the C# compiler actually has 4 levels of warnings. I like to think of them this way: Level 1 - These warnings are cases the compiler is 99.9% sure you did something wrong, but the code is syntactically and semantically...