I ran across an awesome code sample written by Jon Skeet . He realized that many people may have difficulty understanding how the lazy evaluation in LINQ (and programming with iterator combinators in general) works. His program/code sample is able make...

A couple week ago I had an interview with the DotNetRocks folks.  In this interview I discussed the MSDN Code Gallery and I also discuss ed my time as an intern at Microsoft.  It was really fun recording this and my interviewers Carl and Richard...

UPDATE: New version on FastSharp that includes a Windows 7 Gadget! Learn more here. Last year I wrote this program which I named FastSharp. It is a text editor which lets you compile and run C# code that would normally exist inside a method. The...

Today, the new site MSDN Code Gallery has launched.  This is the best place to find and share samples, tools and articles about development and programming.  Code Gallery is already being used by many teams here at Microsoft to post cool tools and samples...

I often browse through directories using the command line interface. It is sometimes times faster and provides more information than using the GUI. However, many times there are operations that are easier in the GUI. This is why I always loved CMD.exe...

There are many features which Opera and Firefox (through extensions) have that I can't live without. Features like advertisement blocking, mouse gestures and custom site JavaScript. Internet Explorer doesn't have these features but I found a plugin which...

I recently read this article about Lazy Computation in C# . What the article discusses is creating lazy evaluation in C#. Lazy evaluation is a key feature of functional languages like Haskell but is not common in imperative languages. It is used in Haskell...

Did you know that you can call a generic method with out supplying the type argument. The C# compiler will fill in the type parameter for you at compile time since the language is strongly typed. static void MyMethod<S>(S myParam) { Console...

In a previous post I mentioned how Visual Basic .NET's lambda expressions are more fun and easy to use than C#'s. My inspiration for this statement was the fact that in VB .NET you are able to implicitly define a lambda expression in this way: Dim f ...

Last year my girlfriend Mallory Emerson drew my attention to a web comic called Dinosaur Comics . It is really funny and inspired me to try to make my own. So while I was in class one day (not the most interesting Information Retrieval lecture) I drew...

I love C# and I would never want to do anything to make it seem any less amazing but I have to give credit where credit is due ... to Visual Basic .NET. Yes, I said it. Both languages have been adding features inspired by the functional and dynamic programing...

With the release of C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9, both languages added support for lambda expressions. Lambda expressions form the basis of lambda calculus which (this will seem a bit mathy) is a formal system which is used to explore mathematical and programmatic...

With the release of .NET 3.5 I started playing around with one of the cool new technologies called LINQ.  LINQ brings SQL like querying syntax for performing operations on data sources like collections into , files or databases into .NET.  The LINQ website...

While in college I worked on several websites for my school ( Binghamton University ). One of my main tasks in developing websites was to create a easy to use system which would let non-developers be able to update and modify web content. I wrote these...

I am sure they will be many blogs and articles that will mention the awesome fact that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 have been released. I am also sure most of these posts will go talk about some of the many cool new features in both....

The Error I restarted my computer for the first time in a couple weeks and it would not boot. I was faced with a screen which said: Grub Loading Stage 1.5 Error 22 A nice helpful error. Now I was faced with a problem and I needed to figure out how to...

Visual Studio doesn't seem to get much credit for the power of its extensibility model. When most people think about a IDE with powerful plug-ins they think of Eclipse, which granted, has some incredible plug-ins. However, Visual Studio's add-in model...

Floating point precision can often be confusing to people. The following code block should illustrate some important things to keep in mind about floating point numbers. In this block I am attempting to get the value 64,000,000 in two different ways....

I have come across many developers who believe that comments are not necessary to make code readable. They argue that code should document itself. By this they mean that the code you write should be clear and have good enough naming conventions such that...

I am the proud owner of a iriver clix portable media player. I have had it for about a year now and I have had no complaints. It works beautifully. When I first got it I had some concerns about using Windows Media Player. The clix is made to work best...

At the beginning of August I moved out to Seattle from New York and since then I have learned some things about this city: People in Seattle dislike Starbucks but are inexorably drawn to constantly go there. Everyone complains how Starbucks sold out and...

Welcome to my first blog post as a Microsoft employee. I work for a team who is truly focused on building a better community around Microsoft developer technologies and tools. I hope I can use this blog to spread information, tips and maybe a few funny...