I’m thrilled to see the availability of Pyvot , a python package for manipulating tabular data in excel. This is part of the Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) ecosystem. Check out the codeplex site at http://pytools.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Pyvot...

I’ve been having a great time using Python Tools for VS .  It’s a free download that provides CPython language support in Visual Studio 2010. The intellisense is pretty good (especially for a dynamic language!) and the debugger is useful to have...

I recently got the newly released Windows Phone 7 (the Samsung Focus ). So far, I love it! This is my first smart-phone.  It’s nice to join the 21st century. I’m also poking around with how to write apps for it. It was easy to download C# Express...

I’ll be speaking at the Lake County .NET User’s Group (LCNUG) near Chicago, Illinois on September 24th.  I’ll be talking about new features in C# 4.0, including named and optional parameters, dynamic support, scripting, office interop and No-PIA...

Harry Pierson has written an excellent set of blog entries about writing a managed debugger in IronPython . He builds on the ICorDebug managed wrappers that we ship in Mdbg and explains many of the concepts for how to write a debugger, such as managing...

CLR V4 fixes an issue with COM-interop that’s been bothering me for a while. The problem is that unless you’re using a PIA, you can often have either your caller or callee be managed code, but not both .  You can import the same COM-classic interface...

As Soma announced, we just shipped VS2010 Beta1 . This includes dump debugging support for managed code and a very cool bonus feature tucked in there that I’ll blog about today. Dump-debugging (aka post-mortem debugging) is very useful and a long-requested...

For those going to the 2009 MVP Summit , I’ll be one of the speakers at the breakout sessions on March 2nd on Microsoft’s Main campus.

This is the longest I've gone without blogging, but our PDC announcements have stuff way too cool to stay quiet about. If you saw PDC , you've head that the CLR Debugging API, ICorDebug, will support dump-debugging . This enables any ICorDebug-based debugger...

The MSDN forums are updated and have a new look and feel. It's at a new link too: http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/netfxtoolsdev/threads/ (the old link still forwards).

Previously, I mentioned some things in Metadata that aren't exposed in Reflection . Here's an opposite case. While metadata represents static bits on disk, Reflection operates in a live process with access to the CLR's loader. So reflection can represent...

I noticed that MSDN finally has nice URLs for the BCL. (Or perhaps that should be "I finally noticed that ...", depending on how long this has been) So instead of: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1009fa28.aspx You can do: http://msdn.microsoft...

My house was haunted. One of the lights would randomly go on or off and random times without anybody fiddling the switch. The previous owner of our house had installed fancy dimmer light switches. On a whim, we replaced one of the fancy switches with...

VB has a " On Error Resume Next ", which tells each line to swallow exceptions and just keep executing to the next line. It's kind of like a try-catch around every single line. It may be tempting for C++ developers to make fun of VB for this, but this...

Punting on a problem can be good or bad, depending on the situation. Punting is not always retreating or surrendering. Punting is good when the problem will be easier to solve later. For example, maybe you suspect something may happen that will render...

If you don't understand the end-to-end scenario, it's easy to do something that is ultimately self-defeating. For example, my 3yr old daughter recently learned to play hide-and-seek . The goal of the game is to hide and avoid being found while the "it...

Sometimes the answer to a question is so obvious that we skip over it looking for a fancier answer. Example: A chair at my house had a bunch of little indentations on the seat - kind of like what you'd expect if somebody took a math compass and poked...

You can argue by providing examples supporting your case. Alternatively, you can argue by appealing to more general principles. For example, in arguing that "exposing public fields is bad," you could say: By-principle: "It breaks abstraction and encapsulation...

System.Reflection is a high-level way of describing Types in .NET targetted at managed code consumers. The API is easy to use, but does not expose all the information that's actually present and affecting decisions. For example, Reflection does not expose...

Binary Compatibility means that when something is updated, you continue to work without needing to even recompile. Source Compatibility means that you need to recompile to keep things working, but you don't have to actually change the sources. One is...

We need some customer feedback to determine if we fix a regression that was added in VS2008. Any language can target the CLR by compiling the language to IL, and then you immediately leverage the .NET platform, including access to the libraries and debugging...

There are multiple reasons to cache data. For example, are you caching because of a performance issue of because of a correctness issue? Know which, and comment it at the spot doing the cache. If it's performance, the idea is that you have some expensive...

Anybody who says "I can write correct multi threaded code" probably should be saying "I don't test my multi-threaded code". It is very difficult to write correct multi-threaded code. One way to appreciate this is various "find-the-bug" pop quizzes that...

Here's a combinatorics quiz: If you have 2 ordered lists (lengths N, M), how many ways can they be interleaved into a single list while still preserving the partial ordering from the original lists? So if the lists were: List 1: A,B List 2: X,Y...

Lang.Net 2008 is coming up this Monday through wed (Jan 28th -Jan 30th). This is targeted at compiler and language implementers. The agenda is here and includes a lot of great Microsoft and non-Microsoft folks. In my former debugging life , my angle for...