Thanks to everyone who showed up at the presentation on monday .  For those interested, I've uploaded the contents of the presentation here .  I was unable to upload the large DB file used during the demo due to size limitations (sky drive will...

The short answer is: No, not when it matters A colleague and I were discussing a particular scenario around IntPtr,PInvoke and 64 bit correctness.  Eventually our discussion lead us to the IntPtr constructor which takes a long.  To my surprise...

The WinForms Timer class allows the user to perform a particular action at a set interval.  Timer objects fire a Tick event at the set time which users can easily respond to.  This is very useful if a developer wants to check for a particular...

Spent about an hour debugging a bit of code today.  I was attempting to read data from a particular source and kept getting back failure codes.  After some debugging I discovered the data didn't actually exist in the source I was reading from...

I will be presenting at the Net Developers Associating meeting this upcoming Monday.  If you're interested in hearing me ramble on in person please drop by.  Event Details: When: Oct 27 7:00PM Where: Microsoft Building 40: The Steptoe Room ...

Answer: When you're the one who threw it.  Starting with the CLR version 2.0, the policy for handling a StackOverflowException was changed.  User code can no longer handle the exception[1].  Instead the CLR will simply terminate the process...

As part of my transition into using 64 bit windows I keep running into a problem with some scripts.  I have a whole set of Powershell scripts that are dedicated to ensuring certain programs are installed on all of my dev machines.  Or that certain...

I think the best answer is: rarely.   It's really hard to go straight to a justification here though.  I find that answering a different question will eventually shed led on when to create a new exception. "What are the benefits of...

Recently I did a community interview with Microsoft MVP Alessandro Del Sole .  The Italian version can be read here.   And no, I don’t speak Italian.  The original transcript is below. 1. Nice to meet you Jared Parsons! Let’s begin by asking...

Recently at work I started using Windows 2008 64 bit edition.  Mainly for hyper-v but powershell also comes as part of the deal.  I'm starting to work through the fun issues of getting some of my environment specific scripts to run in a 64 bit...

I'm struggling with an introduction line to this blog post so I'm just going to go for bluntness:  Regular expressions are limited and it's important to understand these limitations.  Ok, now that the premise is out of the way, lets go to a...

Boolean value types are a constant source of problems for people attempting to generate PInvoke signatures. It's yet another case of managed and native types differing on size. There are two common boolean types in native code: bool and BOOL. As with...

I know this is goes against conventional wisdom but it's something I believe in.  Every sufficiently large project has that section of code nobody wants to go near.  The mere mention of it causes people to leave the room.  It usually has...

If you haven't visited stackoverflow.com yet I encourage you to take a trip. It's a great tag based newsgroup system. Check it out.

The VB Catch syntax has a particular feature not present in C#: When. It allows users to filter expressions based on something other than their type. Any arbitrary code can enter a When block to decide whether or not to handle an Exception Sub Sub1()...

In my previous post I discussed creating an Option style construct for C#/.Net.  This post is a followup with the complete code snippet.  It’s been updated in response to several bits of feedback I received.  Namely Option is now a struct...

F# has a handy method called Unfold.  Think of it as the logical opposite of an Aggregate function.  Aggregates take a sequence of elements and convert them to a single element.  An unfold method will take a single element and turn it into...

Sorry for the terrible pun in the title.  I wanted to blog about developing an F# style Option class for C# and I couldn't resist. The basics of an Option class are very straight forward.  It's a class that either has a value or doesn't. ...

Answer: When PInvoke is involved. I ran across a common error today on stackoverflow regarding P/Invoke that is worth blogging about. The question regarded the translation of a native API with a parameter of type LONG. The user mistakenly used the...

Unfortunately when creating Live Search, the live team did not use a term which could easily be converted to a verb (i.e. google and google-ing).  The term "live searching" doesn't really flow well in a hallway conversation nearly as well...