I’ve been working with Visual Studio 2010 betas for a while now (it’s really great) and have gone through multiple upgrades of VS and the .Net runtime over the past few months. While working on a WCF REST service this week I started seeing assembly load errors when IIS was attempting to initialize my...

One thing that’s somewhat painful about testing/debugging SqlClr application code is managing the connection strings used for internal DB calls inside the system. SqlClr has the notion of a “context connection” connection string which uses the same connection and execution context as that under which...

My boss and I were lamenting the lack of the "friend" declaration in the CLR languages like C# this week. We're working on tightening up the Publishing API for the MTPS system (the publishing system behind msdn2.microsoft.com) and wanted to be able to restrict access to some utility library methods...

I'm working on a project that makes extensive use of Yukon's CLR integration. This makes things that have traditionally been difficult to do in T-SQL (like string manipulation) a whole lot easier. If you aren't familiar with the basics of SQLCLR integration, MSDN has several good overviews. Pablo...

Steve Butler turned me on to this nifty utility that replaces the stock Task Switcher functionality. I installed it on my laptop, and now the plain old Windows task switcher seems so, well -- plain, that I've put it on all my other machines too. Pretty neat.

I seem to spend a lot of time cutting text from web pages or Visual Studio and pasting it into email messages. Oftentimes this causes all manner of wierdness in Outlook 2003, especially when the email messages are formatted as rich HTML. I found a nifty utility which will remove most of the formatting...

I recently got a new laptop, and in the process of setting it up discovered a great utility for tuning ClearType to your monitor (and your personal taste). If you don't know about ClearType you aren't alone. I'm surprised at how many people I know using laptops and digital LCD displays aren't aware of...

[updated: cleaned up links] I got bitten last week by a subtlety in the way Windows Installer packages generated by Visual Studio 2003 handle installing for everyone rather than the default "Just Me" when being run as a silent install. Maybe less a subtlety in the installer than a gap in my understanding...

[updated: cleaned up links] Ran into a bug in the shadow copy cache code in the technical preview of service pack 1 for the .Net Framework v 1.1 last week. After installing the TP I was no longer able to get NDoc to run (it began throwing InvalidCastExceptions when loading projects at startup). Since...