In an earlier blog about resource fallback essentials , I said that the resource diagnostic tool resview is included with the framework sdk. That was wrong – it turns out we previously released resview as a gotdotnet sample, but it’s no longer accessible...

Despite my large and growing number of Dispose-related blogs, I really don't like writing about Dispose. Or rather, I don't like that Dispose is in such a confusing state that it requires so much reading material. :) But here we are again. I'd like to...

NeutralResourcesLanguageAttribute marks the neutral culture for an assembly. That sounds self-referential, but a full description would require another blog post. To avoid getting bogged down, think of neutral culture roughly as the default language....

I recently got a question from a customer using a StreamWriter with a UTF-8 encoding. The StreamWriter threw an EncoderFallbackException on an attempt to write “garbage” Unicode characters. For example, on an attempt to write U+DFC9, which is only half...

A recent internal email thread unearthed extreme differences of opinion about when Dispose(void) should be called on an IDisposable. This led to a long discussion and a realization that -- while it seems like we’ve said everything there is to say about...

Problem and .NET Fix Some customers have observed that a FileSystemWatcher monitoring a network drive fails to fire events after setting InternalBufferSize to certain values. The problem is that the value provided to InternalBufferSize is invalid and...

I can get my work machines into pretty odd states due to various private/beta versions of Microsoft products I've installed. While trying to install VS 2008 on one of my machines, install kept failing, saying I had a pre-release product installed. Problem...

I've gotten some pings on the difference between Disposing and Finalizing, which I didn't discuss in my Dispose/Close post. Fortunately Brian Grunkemeyer has written an excellent blog on the topic: http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2007/10/30/dispose...

I made some quick updates in my recent post to describe the difference between Close and Dispose for SqlConnection: http://blogs.msdn.com/kimhamil/archive/2008/03/15/the-often-non-difference-between-close-and-dispose.aspx If you're wondering about...

Some classes in the .NET framework, such as System.IO.FileStream, have both a Close() and Dispose() method. The natural question is what's the difference, and when you should use one versus the other. The framework guidelines refer to Close and Dispose...

It appears that part 3 of the long path blog series on the BCL blog is now nearly a year overdue! This sounds hard to believe, but BCL really has been that busy . On the bright side, we've been working on exciting projects, such as Silverlight , and now...

Let’s start with the basics: System.Collections.Hashtable is multiple-reader, single-writer threadsafe. System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<K,V> has no thread safety guarantees. Consider a class that has a Dictionary member, and assume...