Today's post is about a very simple rule for API design: don't lie. This seems relatively straightforward, but there are a number of ways in which APIs may end up lying or misleading their consumers. What do I mean by lying? The obvious case is an API...

Today's post is written just to highlight the difference between three different concepts of how objects are managed in a .NET application. First, let's start with the most basic: garbage collection . The MSDN topic on garbage collection fundamentals...

There is a Consuming OData Feeds from a Workflow topic up on MSDN that walks you through the steps of adding a reference to an OData server and building an activity for it that you can then use in your workflows. With full asynchronous support and everything...

The other day someone was asking a question on the WinForms forums about the PropertyGrid class. This control is what you typically interact with to set properties in Visual Studio, and it's a very handy class that you can use at runtime as well for a...

I'd like to start by making sure everyone knows that the Microsoft TechEd sessions are available online . There is some great content that is definitely worth checking out. Today, I'd like to highlight the talk on the T-SQL OVER Clause presented by Adam...

Vitek has another great post in his series over at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vitek/archive/2010/06/16/data-services-expressions-part-6-key-lookup.aspx . There are a couple of things that I think are worth calling out. The provider doesn't know if it needs...

In yesterday's post , I hinted at a method to improve memory usage in your applications. This trick can be applied anytime you have many strings in your application that have the same value but were allocated separately and thus each take up space of...

The other day, a question popped up on the forums about whether the DataSet , by virtue of not being able to “spill to disk” intelligently like a database engine can, was inappropriate for some specific scenario. That got me thinking about how much memory...

Today’s post is a continuation of yesterday’s post . Today, we’ll look at how the app works its magic. To communicate with our Microsoft Exchange server, the first thing to do is to choose the technology. In our case we’ll use Exchange Web Services ,...

Today and tomorrow I will present a short app I wrote for myself that others may find useful as a starting point. Here at Microsoft, the use of Outlook and Exchange are of course ubiquitous (thanks WLW spell checker). So it’s no surprise that I have a...

After dropping off the face of the Internet for about a month, I’m back to blogging on a semi-regular basis. Now that we have a spiffy new blogging engine powering blogs.msdn.com, I’ve also decided to upgrade my old notepad + clipboard editing style and...