This entry explains how to have options associated with your Windows Live Writer plugin, including design patterns, dealing with the UI, persistence issues, and setup/uninstall implications . See here for an example of writing a plugin. What are good...

Windows Live Writer (WLW) is awesome. And writing PlugIns for WLW is easy . Combine the two and you just have to write WLW plugins. The one catch is that to put PlugIns on the WLW Gallery you need to upload an Windows Installer (MSI) file. Putting plugins...

Here's a WiX install script to build an MSI to install a Windows Live Writer (WLW) plugin dll, by xcopying the plugin dll to the Plugins directory. You can then upload your MSI to the WLW Gallery and share your plugin with others. WLW Plugins are very...

I wrote a simple C# app to do text substitution. It takes a (key,value) mapping and then replaces any keys in between {% ... %} with their value. It's a really trivial app. But it also quickly opens a Pandora's box of design questions. It takes an xml...

Here are some random notes about specific ICorDebug breaking changes between .NET v1.1 (Everett) and .NET 2.0 (Whidbey). (I came across these as I was cleaning out old documents in preparation for my upcoming move). This would have been more timely 2...

I wrote a WLW PlugIn to paste from a console. You can download it from the Gallery here . The setup program needs Live Writer Beta 3 . It will: Enclose the text in <pre> tags so that it has that wonderful console look (fixed-width font) optionally...

After 6+ years on the CLR Debugging services, I'm going to be headed over to the Dynamic Language Runtime (think IronPython, Jim Hugunin , + co). (I'm the anonymous dev that John Lam refers to here ) I've had a great time on the CLR. The main reason I...

Interop-debugging (mixed-mode) is managed + native debugging combined. Well, sort of. Native and managed debugging have very different paradigms. Native debugging tends to own the whole process, while managed debugging tends to require control of the...

The System.Diagnostics.Conditional attribute has been on blog-todo list for a while, and I'm finally getting around to it. For the quiz-loving folks, here you go: Quiz : First, some lingo: I'll say a Conditional Function is a function with a Conditional...

Quiz: What managed code runs before managed Main() in your program startup path? Answers : I note "managed code", because obviously the CLR startup code gets executed, as does other native startup code. 1) The common answer is static constructors referenced...

I was on a plane with my 2.75 yr old daughter (yeah, the state-machine one). She noticed the air-jet above her passenger seat and switch that controls it. She turned it on and off. But to fully test the switch's functionality, she also tried other essential...

This is a moot point for pure C# apps, but what if you're writing in MC++ (or some other 'mixed' language) and you want to know if a function is getting compiled as managed or native code? You can try and inspect the source and infer from the language...

Don't have your non-debugger app use the debugging services just to get some cool functionality. The managed debugging services are not just another library that picks up where BCL/ Reflection left off. The BCL + reflection provides some basic ability...

I just noticed that my blog had birthday #3 (Sep 30th) . In tradition, some various stats... 384 posts. (~70 within the last year) I'm almost double the TV rerun mark . So I'm blogging less. Part of it is running out of things to say about .Net debugging...

You may have noticed that debugging optimized builds (eg, what you commonly get when you attach to a end-user instance of your app that wasn't launched from your debugging environment) is usually a degraded experience. At an architectural level, there...

System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break() is a BCL method that causes a program to issue a User Breakpoint when run under the debugger. This translates to a Break() debug event on ICorDebugManagedCallback. (Not to be confused with Breakpoint(), which corresponds...