Like I mentioned in my previous post, for the last months I had to change my programming language from C# to C++. To show you some of the things that surprised me in the process, I will write a short series of blog posts to emphasize the scenarios and...

The project I’ve been working on for the last several months is using native C++. Since I haven’t employed C++ in a long time (since school, to be precise), I had to “relearn” the language. As expected, the language grew a lot since last I was acquainted...

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule , the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity ) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This applies to programming as well: 80% of the...

Scenario: You have to design and implement a distributed application where a lot of clients call different operations in parallel. In certain situations, in order to make the system behave better, you need to delay some operations. Some examples where...

For quite a while I’ve been using Live Writer to edit and publish blogs and I am quite satisfied with it (there are some quirks, no doubt about it, but it mostly works). I recently tried to install Live Writer on my newest Win7 box and I had a most...

WCF is all about communication objects – channels, listeners, factories, all implement the ICommunicationObject interface (some through the CommunicationObject class). This provides a base implementation for the basic state machine states and transitions...

Every other year, Microsoft organizes a conference for women. Why? Because it recognizes that women more than men feel the need to get inspired by listening to some sessions oriented towards the emotional space and, more to the point, women feel the need...

Event Tracing for Windows is the standard way to trace used by all features of Windows. Like the article Improve Debugging And Performance Tuning With ETW explains, ETW is “a general-purpose, high-speed tracing facility provided by the operating...

I recently had to solve these kind of requirements: some components execute actions and at some point in time need to notify other components that certain events happened, so the other components can execute code related to these events. For example,...

The .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 are live. If you haven’t tried the bits, do so and give the team feedback . There are some very cool features added – just take a look at the highlights . On the Communications front, Windows Communication...

When it comes to performance, there's a hard lesson I had to learn: never trust anyone, measure for yourself! Don't trust the gurus, the MSDN documentation, the technical fellow that wrote the code. Instead, do some simple performance measurements to...

As part of the project I am working on, I had to create performance counter categories and counters for monitoring and debugging purposes. So I wrote the code that installs the counters and everything worked as expected on my machines. Then someone told...

I consider regular expressions one of the most useful features ever. I use them a lot, not only when coding, but also when editing files and instead of copy and paste. I find the Visual Studio Find/Replace feature with regular expressions really useful...

Using Visual Studio to write code requires creating a project (well, you can use Visual Studio without a project, but you won’t get very much past Notepad functionality – there’s not even Intellisense on files) . After creating / opening an existing project...

The registry editor has a very useful functionality that many people overlook – the favorites. You can add the keys you are interested in the favorites category, so that you can access them later with one click. To add a key, navigate to it, then choose...

Like I mentioned in my previous article , CLR integrates WER in order to be able to add managed-specific information in the reports generated on crashes (if you are not familiar with Windows Error Reporting, read more in the article Windows Error Reporting...

Windows Error Reporting (WER) monitors and collects information on crashes and hangs on Windows platforms newer that Windows XP. The information collected can be sent to a server for investigation (read more in my previous WER article ). When creating...

Windows Error Reporting is the replacement for Dr. Watson on OSs newer that Windows XP. It monitors failures and collects useful information that can be sent to a server to be analyzed (if the user allows it). This feature helped Microsoft to fix a lot...

There are situations when we want to look closely at a process that is running in production environment – when a crash happens or when it just behaves badly (consumes too much memory, too much CPU, it hangs etc). There are multiple tools that can tell...

Is it just me or most developers like to implement functionality and logic for their websites and freak out when they have to make it pretty? I personally hate writing style sheets – CSS may sound easy, and I understand the concepts, but don't ask me...

I sometimes hear people complain that they tried to open a dump file in windbg , but couldn’t get sos running. First, make sure that you are loading the dump with the corresponding debugger – open an x86 dump with an x86 debugger and an x64 one with the...

2 years ago I interviewed at Microsoft for a Software Development Engineer in Test – and I probably did well, since I am now working here. Lately, I interviewed people myself (mostly college hires). Looking back, I realize I did a very good thing at my...

I wrote a simple C++ program that removes the duplicate spaces in a string. The function doing the work is RemoveDupSpaces : char * RemoveDupSpaces( char *s) { char *a = s; char *b = s; while (*a != '\0' ) { while (*a != ' ' &&...

The Visual Studio Immediate Window is a great tool to increase your productivity. A lot of people are not aware that you can test functions in your program without writing any code by using this little tool. Look in the msdn entry for Immediate Window...

The System.IO namespace contains types that allow reading and writing to files and data streams, and types that provide basic file and directory support. Looking at all the streams classes, I sometimes get this overwhelmed feeling: which one do I use...