Scott writes about the proposal to cut crashdump support . Let him know what you think. Personally, I think we should be much more aggressive with culling features, as we also add new ones. You end up with a cleaner product that is a better fit.

Gee, this blog has been pretty quiet. Why? Could I have lost interest in the connection with all the C# developers in the world? No! My responsibilities have drifted somewhat, to areas that make less sense to blog about. Dev Lead I'm the development lead...

We continue to hire in to the C# team. Here's the list of currently open positions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/jobs If you'd like to talk about jobs in C#, but nothing in that list suits you, don't let that stop you! Drop me a mail & tell me...

On Eric's blog, a discussion about 'switch' statements in C# & why they require 'break' inspired this post. One of my favorite principles in the design of C# is that it forces you to be explicit when that removes confusion. The best example is the...

I wanted to post a short note about all the different job opportunities available today in C#. We have 3 areas of focus: C# IDE (Refactoring, intellisense, etc. - what I work on) C# Compiler (command line compiler + IDE integration) Visual Studio Debugger...

In our bug database, when resolving a bug, you have to select a “Resolution”. Obviously you can resolve as “Fixed”. Other options include: By Design - this isn’t a bug, we meant it to work this way. Not Repro - you were mistaken, this bug doesn’t exist...

This question came up on a customer chat today. It’s probably interesting to a wider audience, so I’m posting it here. I'm currently doing TDD with NUnit. With the upcoming testing tools in Whidbey, how do you see the separation of tests from production...

Back in da day, I used to go to VC/VS themed conferences and talk about the debugger. Even though I wasn't a very good speaker, the talks were very well received. Lots of technical content, tips for how to be more productive with the debugger. When I...

The idea popped in to my head, so I wrote it down. I’m not sure what it’s good for, but here it is: class C { private C() { } public static class Factory { public static C New() { return new C (); } } } class Program { static void Main ( string [] args...

Earlier I talked about the challenges of shipping software . You want Whidbey, and we want to give it to you. To make that happen, we need to fix the remaining bugs & shut this product cycle down. We want to focus our attention on this work, so we...

Related to the questions around TAB and ENTER are some questions around the new “autocomplete on identifier”. (I could swear I’ve blogged about this before, but I can’t seem to find it.) In VS2002 / VS2003, if you type ‘foo.’, you get a completion list...

We're going back and forth on a rather narrow design issue in IntelliSense. Suppose you're writing some code. (It's a stretch, I know.) You go to type an if/else: if (expr) { // ... } else // here { // ... } Here’s what happens when you type ‘else’. 1...

Looking in RssView, I see a big mess. There are lots of fields. Some are related to each other & different from others, which suggest an Extract Class. Some are set at initialization time, while others change over time. Clearly there’s a difference...

Yesterday I decided to take a look at the code we shipping in the Beta 1 C# Express SKU for a screen saver. I was pretty disappointed in the quality of the code, so I decided to refactor. I’ve talked about some ideas about coding styles here on this blog...

We’re sitting around watching a video from a usability study. A subject has been exploring the Refactoring menu, and has just tried Promote Local . With the help of the very specific error messages I wrote (yay exceptions), he finally gets...

Almost 4 months after the first post in the series … not bad! There are 3 Signature Change Refactorings: Remove Parameter Reorder Parameter Promote Local I rank these as “Tier 2” – they’re not as important...

On the Yahoo! Groups Refactoring DL, Ron Jeffries asked some questions about Visual C# 2005 Refactorings. "Can you say how you expect the Microsoft refactorings to stack up against the existing ones that are out there?" I've personally spent...

Someone asked me about this, so I decided to write up the answer here in case other folks are interested. Indexers are pretty well documented on the web; I’ll quote some here. http://www.csharphelp.com/archives/archive140.html C#...

In this entry on Ladybug , a customer asked for named indexers in C#. Here’s one way to get it: class Car { object [] wheels; public WheelsHelper Wheels { get { return new WheelsHelper ( this ); } } public class...

Looking over the top-10 lists on Ladybug , I realized there's an excuse to speak up. So, here goes: Suggestions #1 - C# Edit and continue. Dude. Yeah. Totally. We've been saying for a while that this is our #1 customer request. Now you're...

When you enter an issue in Ladybug you should always get a response from us. We have a goal of responding to every issue you report. When I write my response, I identify myself clearly, so you can come complain if you don't like what I say. I also...

Based on some feedback from the Beta, we're tuning the behavior of the VS 2005 Formatting Engine. We'd like to hear what you think of the changes.

Looking over our oldest C++ code, there is, of course, a lot of potential for Refactoring. That’s a nice way of saying that it sucks. We learned about Refactoring because we wanted to build good tools for our customers. Along the way, we also...

Steve Clark talked about usability of APIs, and a snag some users hit when writing against ADO.NET, and some possible ways to help. It should come as no surprise that I think the ideal solution for this problem relies on the editor. (Because my team makes...

In Properties with events: another attempt , Omer said: I would rather have a protected virtual OnSet method and AfterSet event than just an OnSet event (also consistant with the naming convention ;). I know understand that this is a common...