Here are some old notes I had about Reflection vs. the raw IMetadata Import interfaces. They’re from a while ago (before CLR 4.0 was shipped!), but still relevant. Better to share late than never! Quick reminder on the two APIs I’m comparing here: Reflection...

I published a nuget package ( CsvTools.Azure ) to easily read/write CSVs to azure blobs and tables.  It builds on the CSV reader , also on Nuget (see CsvTools ) and GitHub ( https://github.com/MikeStall/DataTable ). Azure Tables are very powerful...

  I updated my open source CSV reader to provide parsing rows back into strongly typed objects. You can get it from Nuget as CsvTools 1.0.6. For example, suppose we have a CSV file “test.csv” like so: name, species, favorite fruit, score Kermit,...

We’ve just added support for WebAPI to provide per-controller-type configuration. WebAPI has a HttpConfiguration object that provides configuration such as: route table Dependency resolver for specifying services list of Formatters, ModelBinders, and...

I wrote about WebAPI’s parameter binding at a high level before. Here’s what’s happening under the hood. The most fundamental object for binding parameters from a request in WebAPI is a HttpParameterBinding . This binds a single parameter. The binding...

I amended my open-source CsvTools with an Excel reader. Once I read the excel worksheet into a datatable, I can use all the data table operators from the core CsvTools, including enumeration, Linq over the rows, analysis, mutation, and saving back out...

Here’s how you can easily customize WebAPI parameter binding to include values from source other than the url.  The short answer is that you add a custom ValueProvider and use Model Binding, just like in MVC. ValueProviders are used to provide values...

MVC provides several ways for binding your own arbitrary parameter types.  I’ll describe some common MVC ways and then show how this applies to WebAPI too. You can view this as a MVC-to-WebAPI migration guide.  (Related reading: How WebAPI binds...

I described earlier how WebAPI binds parameters . The entire parameter binding behavior is determined by the IActionValueBinder interface and can be swapped out. The default implementation is DefaultActionValueBinder. Here’s another IActionValueBinder...

Here’s an overview of how WebAPI binds parameters to an action method.  I’ll describe how parameters can be read, the set of rules that determine which technique is used, and then provide some examples.   [ update ] Parameter binding is ultimately...

I recently joined the ASP.Net team and have been working on WebAPI , which is a new .NET MVC-like framework for building HTTP web services. (This is certainly a change of pace from my previous life in the world of compilers and debuggers, but I’m having...

I did some volunteer work a few years ago that required processing lots of CSV files. So I solved the problems by writing a C# CSV reader, which I wanted to share here. The basic features here are: be easy to use read and write CSV files (and support...

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...