Here's a cool tool on CodePlex that Tim pointed me to f or anyone who needs to write unit tests on your data-access code: http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=MassDataHandler “The MassDataHandler is a framework to...

Here's a list of things that may slow down execution under a debugger. I've seen a few threads go by about ways that running under the debugger significantly slows down normal execution by more than 2x, and this is a collection of those items. Background...

Visual Studio's IDE will copy code as RTF (Rich Text Format). Web browsers like HTML. So posting code from Visual into blogs means a decent RTF to HTML conversion. And having a technical blog means posting code. So I needed to solve this conversion problem...

I just got burned by using callbacks in a multi-threaded app. I've rewritten the part to avoid callbacks, but for my good-deed-of-the-day, I wanted to issue a word of warning. Before you can safely use a callback / delegate / virtual function, particularly...

Whenever you're passing in a parameter of System.Type that is usually determined at compile-time, consider having a version with a generic parameter. This converts runtime checks into compile time checks, may let you have more efficient code, and likely...

Both GCHandle's ToIntPtr and AddrOrPinnedObject take in a GCHandle and return an IntPtr. I had to do a double-take to remember the difference between them, so I'd thought I'd blog about it. GCHandle.AddOrPinnedObject is for passing the address of the...

Question 1) What's the return value from this C# function: static int Test() { int val = 1; try { return val; } finally { val = 2; } } Question 2) What about this (using a static instead of local) static int s_val; static...

You can debug ngen (aka prejitted) code from VS2005 and also have the VS2005 IDE launch ngenned code. In practice, images are rarely ngenned as debuggable. And usually when under a debugger, assemblies are loaded with debuggable code-gen flags (In VS...

System.Object represents a managed object within a process. ICorDebugValue is the debugger's representation of a System.Object within the debuggee process. The key here is that the debugger and debuggee processes are ideally fully isolated from each...