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...