There is no escaping from concurrency challenges... or is there? (A slightly modified version of this article was published in the August 2008 edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter ) Dual, quad, and eight-core processors are becoming the norm. Is your application capable of utilising all available...

As you are probably aware, one of the new additions to the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is a technology called ADO.NET Data Services (code name Astoria). ADO.NET Data Services natively supports ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF) models. However Data Services it is not limited to EF. ADO.NET Data Services can...

Not sure about you but I was not aware of the existence of the DebuggerStepThroughAttribute . Debugging code can be difficult at times and any tool or mechanism that can ease this pain is always welcome. As far as the CLR is concerned, there is no semantic attached to this attribute. However Visual...

I recently wrote an MSDN Flash article on the hidden gems of System.Core.dll of .NET Framework 3.5 which was published in the October issue of the MSDN Flash . Here is a copy of that article: If you have played with Visual Studio 2008, chances are that you have come across the System.Core.dll which...

If you have ever used the System.Threading.ReaderWriterLock to achieve synchronised access to shared resources which are frequently read but infrequently updated then you probably know why we have created a new Reader/Write lock. In this MSDN Magazine’s concurrent affairs column , Jeffery Richter explains...

As you are probably aware Thread.Abort() raises a ThreadAbortException in the thread on which it is invoked, to begin the process of terminating the thread. Please note that if Abort is called on a managed thread while it is executing unmanaged code, a ThreadAbortException is not thrown until the...

A major issue with running all COM components using STA threads is that the thread which calls CoInitializeEx must be the only thread executing method invocations on that COM instance. Now assume a scenario in which the STA thread is busy performing other activities. In those scenarios you will receive...

Each .NET CLR based process is given a pool of threads. The size of the thread pool is configurable however by default the maximum number of threads created by the thread pool is set to 1000 IO threads in total, and 25 worker threads per logical or physical processor. In other words, when using a dual...

Download sample code Much has been said and written about satellite assemblies and localization techniques that are achieved using them. I believe that most of the industry has no doubt in the usefulness of this amazing feature of the .NET Framework; however the lack of automation has made it slightly...

There are at least 2 options to consider for using user-specific configurations: - Custom configuration mechanism: using technologies such as the XML Serializer. - XML Configuration feature in .NET 2.0: This is the main topic of this blog entry. One of the great features of .NET Framework (first...

Application tracing is usually turned off on production releases. Therefore it is recommended not to use string formatting methods if their output is being ignored. string.Format is usually an expensive method and should be avoided if its output is not consumed: Log.Write( string .Format( "User {0...

Many developers are not aware that according to CLR it is perfectly OK to throw exceptions which are NOT derived from System. Exception : Exceptions such as DateTime, Int64 and String. Although languages such as C# do not allows programmers to throw these types of exceptions it should still be possible...

Well as you probably know by now Vista’s clever UAC ensures that gacutil is not run with Administrator privileges and usually for installing and uninstalling assemblies into the gac you’ll need admin rights. A simple solution is to right-click on a Command Prompt icon and select Run as Administrator...