This one was pretty much TheoY’s. I coded it up, which probably means I corrupted his idea. So, give him credit for the good parts and I’ll take balme for the bad parts. Pretty much the same approach was taken in C++ by Johny in his...

I hoped I could write a generic helper class that you could use when Refactoring your enum to a class. I wrote this: class EnhancedEnum <T> where T : struct { public readonly T Value; public EnhancedEnum (T value) { this .Value...

This is the follow up to the enum->class refactoring post . So, one approach is to try to decode what ‘enum’ does in C#. Thomas Eyre’s answer is pretty much the same, with a couple differences: · Thomas wrote his TDD...

A commenter asks about reporting crashes when working in a private network. There's another way to send in a crash, but it invloves a bunch of manual labor, on both your side & and on mine. One of the advantages is that it's good for reporting...

Cyrus blogs about the “Watson” technology we use. I want to second his request. When a product crashes & Windows offers to upload a crash report, please send it! The dumps get uploaded, analyzed by an automated system, and sent to the...

Every so often, I see a C# user say they’d like to add a method to an enum. Maybe it’s [Flags] and they want to verify that the combination of flags is legal according to their business rules. Or maybe they’re in the process of moving...

Rovert asks: “ What is RTLMirroring? ” The answer comes from Marin who is responsible for Visual Studio Localization: We made a breaking change to the RTL behavior for controls inheriting from the common control, so we added this...

In a comment on the Perfect Software Project, 2 of Todd's items are: - Training days. The company doesn't have to pay for it, but if I want to go to TechEd, don't make me take vacation to do it. - Allow some playing around in your code. Every now...

What do you love about how software development is done where you are? What do you hate, and how would you improve it? Suppose you could work on the perfect software project. What would it look like? What's the ideal hardware, tools, processes,...

The updated spec has been posted.

A question came up on an internal email list. You will get this error in the following code, as per the rules of C#: try { .... } catch(Exception e) { // Handle cleanup. throw; } With the exception of disabling...

There has been a lot of discussion, both here and on Andy's blog about C# E&C. Some folks really want it badly. So, I figure you deserve an update on its status. At the last PDC, we got a lot of strong feedback along the lines of “We understand...

There's a new blogger from the C# team. Cyrus works for me on the IDE. He is being quite prolific on his new blog - 29 posts in 3 days. He's just as prolific when coding, which is great new for you - Cyrus's work results in better C# IDE features.

A suggestion arrived in email, and here is my response. (None of this is on the feature list for Whidbey, it’s just ideas.) 1. Fully qualify (all names / all names in namespace X / all instances of type Y / the instance under my cursor), removing...

Chris got his wish : We have Generate Method Stub in Whidbey. There is a command & key binding in my build. It may not have made it into the last Community Preview, but it should be in the upcoming Beta. You can edit the test that gets inserted...

Cyrus then incorporated the Weak/Strong reference stuff into the LazyLoader. He also refactored the factory to give you a reliable, predictable default & be a bit simpler. (You also need Optional<> and the Lock<> code.) First, the...

Then Cyrus decided he wanted to support weak references. A weak reference is one that the GC can decide to release if there are no other references to it. For our LazyLoader, that would mean that you create the item when demand appears, and it may...

Cyrus just can’t stop! First he Refactored Optional<> , basically to use a singleton for None<> interface IOptional <A> { A Value { get ; } } class None <A> : IOptional <A> { public static...

Finally, the LazyLoader class. Credit goes to Kevin & Cyrus (who doesn't have a blog). delegate T Creator <T>(); class LazyLoader <T> { IOptional <T> value = new None <T>(); readonly ILock @lock; ...

There was a comment that the LazyLoader was not thread safe . We decided to add thread safety & refactor. One of the concerns we had was that locking isn’t necessary if you know ahead of time that you’ll always be single-threaded...

While Refactoring the LazyLoader , we produced the code below. It’s useful any time you want to add a sentinel value to a type. interface IOptional <T> { T Value { get ;} } class None <T> : IOptional <T>...

2 weeks ago we hit ZBB . We do some funky stuff to describe the goal. For example, we only counts bugs that are >48 hours so. Bugs take time to get routed, investigated, etc., so this helps make the problem more tractable. Then we discount bugs...

When you install VS (or rather the .NET Redist), you get a C# compiler (csc.exe + cscomp.dll), which comes with a csc.rsp. Gus blogs about how it affects how you build. However, this response file ony affects command line builds, not building with...

One of the things we're trying to do for Whidbey is a feature we call the “unbound type smart tag”. You'd probably call it “automatic add 'using'”, I guess. It works like this: You have a typename in your code, and you've referenced...

In VS, you can have your strings colorized. This feature has been around for a long time. However, the default string color is the same as the default text color, so you may not notice at first. In C#, there are two string colors: “String”...