Pilchie's C# and Visual Studio Blog

Sorry for the delay.  I took a disconnected vacation for a week after CodeMash .  Now that I’ve completed my own personal Planes, Trains and Automobiles trip, I wanted to make sure that I posted the slides from my CodeMash session .  You...

Well, it's been about a year since the last time I posted.  It's a little funny that my previous post was about how I'm going to speak at Seattle CodeCamp in 2008, and this post is about having just spoken at Seattle CodeCamp 2010.  Anyway,...

This Saturday from 2:45-4:00 I’ll be giving a talk on “What’s coming up in VS2010 for C# Developers?”  at Seattle Code Camp .  I’ll mostly be showing off some of the new features we’ve been working on for VS2010, especially those related to...

In VS2008 SP1 our team added a significant new feature: live semantic analysis of open files (or “background squiggles” as we called it internally).  Unfortunately, soon after release we found a few small issues with the release.  They are:...

Yesterday at the PDC, Dustin announced the availability of CodeRush Xpress for C# .  This is a free addin for VS 2008 that provides a whole bunch of fantastic editor productivity features.  Download it today and give it a shot!

The topic of removing elements from a dictionary came up recently on an internal mailing list.  Someone was iterating through all the elements of a collection and wanting to remove some of them. The problem with that is that modifying the collection...

I hate using strings to represent program elements!  One of the big problems is that it hinders automated refactoring.  Strings don’t have any semantic meaning, so refactoring tools don’t know which references to the string need to be updated...

Just a quick update.  After my previous post, I actually stopped using virtualization for most cases, since I found the performance hit to be too significant.  While the automation I mentioned before still doesn’t support HyperV, I hand built...

Lately I've been trying to support work happening in a variety of our development branches, and that's been challenging to the two machine setup I mentioned here . Visual Studio (unfortunately) takes a long time to install and uninstall. Also during our...

I'm still here, I've just been very busy.  We're in the thick of planning out what we'd like to do for the next version of Visual Studio.  If you have any suggestions, please drop them in the comments section.  I'm most interested in the...

My colleague Kirill mentioned a post he had about named parameters , but I thought I would pull it up out of the comments, because I think it's pretty interesting.  It's similar to a system I've been using to simplify writing data classes that I...

There were some points about my previous post that I thought it might be worth bringing up in a new entry. It seems that in general, most people agree that the set of bool parameters are a bad idea. I found this a little surprising, given how often I...

I often find myself writing or consuming API's which require the caller to specify some sort of options.  I've seen numerous ways to specify those options, but I've yet to find one that I really like.  Let's work with an example throughout the...

Another problem related to using VS in order to develop VS happens in the area of unit testing. The problem here is that my team would like to write tests for the C# language service in C#, unfortunately, this means that our dogfood IDE has the release...

There are a couple of issues that come up for developers who work on Visual Studio that just aren't issues for most people.  The first is that working on components of VS while using VS is hard.  It's hard for a couple of reasons. You want to...

A friend sent me a link to Tomas Restrepo's collection of VS Color Schemes today.  I think it's a fantastic idea.  I like to use a dark background, but there sure a lot of settings that need to be changed in order for it to be usable. ...

Today being Thanksgiving here in the US (it's a month late, I know, but what can you do, eh?), my family spent the day making a big turkey dinner.  My wife is usually the big cook in our house, but today she's got a bit of cold, so I ended up doing...

A bunch of people ( Eric , Wes , Joe , etc) have been writing about the wonders of immutable data structures lately.  A friend who no longer works at MS suggested that I should dig up some code that he wrote with some feedback from me to try and...

Okay, anyone whose been holding their breath for the last 1.5 years for part two of this series, I'm going to have to disappoint you.  I have no idea anymore what it was that I was planning on writing about in Part 2 of that series.   However...

So I said on Saturday that I would write a future post about the performance issues I've been seeing. Instead I'm going to write two separate posts. First because, I don't entirely understand both issues, and second, because I think this one might get...

We finally got it out there. Take a look at msdn . Or, to see it from the big guy, Soma's blog . Please go get this, and let us know what you think.

It's been ages since I've posted anything here, but I'm going to try and get back into the swing of things. So what's new with me. For the last week or so, I've been helping out the Winforms team, instead of working on the C# IDE. This has been...

Not much to report for today, as I didn't have much of a chace to attend the show content. I was kept pretty busy at the Microsoft booth talking to people and showing them some of the new stuff we've been building for Whidbey. Tomorrow should be an exciting...

So today I arrived in Calgary for the Agile/XP Universe conference. I'm really excited to be here and get a chance to talk to some of the people who are here. Had quite a day of travelling, as I got a shuttle to the airport this morning. It picked me...

A while back I asked for some feedback about how we should format anonymous methods. Then I was asking whether the default should be to put the opening brace on the same line as the delegate keyword or not. From your feedback, it looks like we'll keep...