While I haven't been posting much here, I have been posting pretty regularly over on my main development blog code-o-rama . The main reason is that I'm running a newer version of Community Server over there, which has better editing, etc.. Here are some...

Merry Christmas, etc., etc.. Hope you are all enjoying your XBOX 360's. New year, new blog name. I'm renaming by blog and refocusing it for 2007. Recently we decided to give everyone on the Visual Studio Diagnostics team a Director's title (minus the...

We were having a discussion today about Microsoft Points and that it would be useful to be able to transfer them to others as payment for, oh I don't know let's say, um, gambling debts. Hey, that would be just like real money! Couldn't find anything about...

As you know if you are a Visual Studio Team System user, we provide two types of profilers with the product; sampling and trace. If you are not familiar with this feature of VSTS, one place to start are the excellent TechNotes under the Development heading...

One of the things that you often want to do when creating a Windows Installer using WiX is to uninstall the existing product before installing the new one. This is referred to as doing a " major upgrade ". The way to pull this off is to add the following...

I just rediscovered the Ethereal network protocol analyzer . I was trying to track down a problem using the tcptrace proxy which is a nice simple little tool when it works. I'm not quite sure what the problem was, but I was seeing different behavior when...

I've always loved editors with built in macro languages. Once you have macro control of every facet of the editor you can pull off some really cool and time saving tricks. I gave up macros back in the early 90's for the graphical environment of Microsoft...

Some platform features are like the stuff hiding under rocks at the seashore. No, I don't mean the one's that are slimey and stinky. I'm talking about the one's that are interesting but hard to spot. But, all you need to do is catch a glimpse of them...

If you have been using NUnit to write your unit tests, and you have access to Visual Studio 2005 Team System you'll want to consider upgrading your NUnit tests to the VS Unit Test Framework, which I'll call VSUnit for short. There is a walkthrough that...

Boy, I seem to spend all my time in the deep dark recesses of the CLR. OK, this post is a little bit out there; I hope someone finds it useful. There's a problem with doing instrumented profiling of applications in Visual Studio 2005 Team System that...

I seem to have come across this several times in the past week or two, so it's worth making a note. In .NET 2.0 XmlValidatingReader is obsolete. You need to do something like the following in order to create a validating reader now: XmlReaderSettings...

I was over at Building 20 on the Microsoft campus the other day and I noticed that all the lab machines were running a really cool 3D screen saver. I just had to have it! And here it is . A little more clicking leads me to a collection of Really Slick...

You find yourself facing a seemingly broken logon screen. Every character you type seems to come out as some other character. Perhaps you know JohnL-S had something to do with configuring that system. You type ASDF and it comes out AOEU. What’s going...

Ahhhhh. There's nothing quite like pasting a big chunk of code into your blog. It makes the prose writing part so much easier! My last entry was about counting bits. Today I put that in the context of the original problem. Todays entry comes from...