You had me at "Hello World"

Just bought a Surface RT device? Congratulations! I purchased a Microsoft Surface RT , and I am very happy with mine. If you want to know if your device works with your new Surface RT, check Windows Hardware Compatibility List for Windows RT. http...

So you wrote and published Windows Phone 7 apps, and of course you want to know how well your apps are doing. Below are some resources to help you see the reviews left for your apps from different part of the world. http://sorokoletov.com/ztop/ http:...

I just installed Visual Studio 2010 on a different machine, and I noticed I missed several things that I really enjoyed on my primary machine. I was looking for a missing updates, and my machine and Visual Studio is fully updated. I realized, I did not...

You can get a free ebook, Programming Windows Phone 7, by Charles Petzold here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/10/28/free-ebook-programming-windows-phone-7-by-charles-petzold.aspx

I read this article that I found really helpful. It covers some keyboard shortcuts that can be useful. My favorites have always been Win+Keypad and Shift+Right Click on a folder, now I found out more. http://www.guidingtech.com/4535/windows-7-keyboard...

One of my biggest challenge to understand WPF is the concept of attached property and dependency property. Every time I ask someone, I have a slightly different answer. I think I have a good grasp of the concept, this is how I can explain how dependency...

It is really hard for me to think another way to build services, other than WCF. WCF team did a very good job handling all the necessary plumbing. This post shows a quick tutorial on how to expose a WCF service as a REST service, using IIS. This post...

I just found out that Bill Gates joins Twitter ( link ), and also has a facebook account ( link ).

Whenever I need to attach an event handler, usually I use one of these methods, a delegate, anonymous method, or lambda expression. For complex events (more than 3 lines of code), I create a separate method. If the method is short, I use anonymous method...

Another follow-up from my previous article, Programmatically Configuring Permissions on a Share , David B asked a question, how to share a folder to Everyone, instead of to a specific users. This article will answer that question, based on the code on...

If you have more than a dozen web servers in a cluster with identical setting, and you need to update the virtual directory, it is much more convenient to write a simple program to update it. This example shows how to do it. In this case, this snippet...

This is a quite common problem, there is a list of strings, and you need to concatenate them with a delimiter, let says a comma. There are several different approaches to this problem. Before .Net era, I use for loop, and check if the loop counter is...

I have been using PInvoke.Net for long time. I discovered a tool, P/Invoke Interop Assistant. It is very cool. Not only it can gives you the managed wrapper around the native Windows API, it also gives you the ability to generate the unmanaged signature...

This is the scenario, system A is taking an xml from system B. System A will deserialize the xml into an object. Unfortunately, a dev in system B decides that System.Xml namespace is evil and construct the xml using StringBuilder. In one of the element...

C# introduces a number of syntactic sugar, including Automatic Property link . A question was asked, why is this useful, what is the advantage of this approach compared to exposing the field as public field? The advantage of the automatic property is...

One of the requirements in building setups was to allow the Operations team to execute the .msi file from the command line. GUI is not for expert! :) If you are familiar with Visual Studio setup, each of the UI element has a property, and you pass this...

I spent some time planning on improvements that I wanted to do on one of our project. I reviewed the code that I notice a place where I think I could improve the performance by avoiding locking. So I wrote the code, and tested it, works great, the new...

I downloaded and installed IE 8 RC 1 on my machine. It works really well, the performance improvement is significant. I would encourage you to give it a try, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx . Disclaimer, this...

Happy New Year, everyone. Wish you all the best this year.

Just a simple thought, when creating a multi-threaded applications, make the number of threads configurable. ThreadPool has this behavior that it will immediately set the minimum worker threads equal to the number of logical processors in your machine...

One application had a memory issue, it just consume too much resources. The application performed well, but it is very obvious when we saw the performance counters, something can be done to make it better. Reviewing the code did not reveal something significant...

When you created a Windows Service, you usually add a Service Installer to allow this service to be installed using InstallUtil or installing it programmatically like this post shows you. The service installer will create the Event Log for the service...

I needed to get the location of IIS log files on my servers, after doing a quick investigation, I am quite amazed on how much information are exposed via managed code. This snippet will return the name of the sites and the location of the log files. foreach...

PDC is almost over, did you know that you can access the recorded sessions online? Go to http://www.microsoftpdc.com , and click on Agenda on the top. then click on Sessions tab. Pick the session that you want to watch, scroll down, you should see a Video...

Sometimes you may want to install a Windows Service programmatically, but the target machine does not have InstallUtil.exe. To install a Windows Service programmatically, you can build an application to install that Windows Service. Add a reference to...