I've been promising myself an extended vacation for a long time now, but working at Microsoft has been so much fun I've kept postponing it. Well, this is it - my last day at Microsoft. Feel free to email me at 'hotweird' at hotmail.

I just read two salon articles about Scott Rosenberg's new book Dreaming in Code. His thesis is that " programing is hard " and uses the experiences of the development of the Chandler project to frame the discussion. Scott identifies a common problem...

A friend of mine recently sent me some code to review: Hi Peter, Do you have any suggestions on how to clean up this code? In particular the creation of a particular singleton type doesn't look very pretty in this model: private DoubleCheckedLock<SingletonClass>...

Don Syme and the F# team have just released a new version of F#. Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/archive/2006/11/30/f-1-1-13-now-available.aspx Peter

The smart folks over in the MSR-Human Interactions in Programming team have done some interesting research into the question of "What Do Programmers Really Do Anyway?". I'm more than a little pleased to see that the data is consistent with the assertions...

Hey Folks, Charlie Calvert video taped our discussion on some of the new C# 3.0 features. Find it here: http://wm.microsoft.com/ms/msdn/visualcsharp/peter_hallam_2006_11/PeterHallam01.wmv . Cheers, Peter

Way back in 2002 when we started working on Whidbey, I captured my thoughts on the direction we should take for C# and Visual Studio in two large emails. In the first email The Yardstick I spent a lot of time saying that you must evaluate features against...

Hey folks, First off, I want to appologize for not having any activity on my blog for a while. I just got back from a wonderful 3 week vacation in Spain. Now that I'm back, rested and limber, here's a twisted peice of C# code which is gauranteed to...

I finally decided to play with the style settings on my blog. As you may have guessed, I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to websites and blogging. Let me know what you think of the new look. Last weeks posting generated some great comments. Tzagotta...

Just a quick one this week: Why is it that you cannot use enum constants in a switch statement's cases without first casting them to type int? Often you will want to use Enum constants as case labels in switch statements. Sometimes, the compiler...

One of the main benefits of the addition of generics to C# is the ability to easily create strongly typed collections using types in the System.Collections.Generics namespace. For example, you can create a variable of type List<int>, and the compiler...

I’m back from my course on Software Design. Now that we are starting to think about the version of C# after VS 2005 we are shining a bright light on all the ways the current compiler codebase could be better. This is the fun part of the product cycle...

I've been out this week taking a great course on designand architecture. For those interesed in the evolution of C#, check this out http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

I hope everyone had a good fourth of July weekend. I certainly did. I spent the weekend hiking around the Olympic peninsula with my girlfriend and capped it off watching the fireworks here in Seattle. On to our question of the week: We get a lot of...

Well here it is, one week into my many questions series and I'm already late for the second issue. I have a good reason though, as I took a long weekend to rock climb out at Stone Hill near Eureka Montana. If you are into climbing, I highly recommend...

I get a lot of questions about the rationale behind the design of the C# language. Over the next few months I'm going to try and make a point of posting a C# language design question up here every Monday. This week's question comes from Erik Meier. ...

Nicholas Paldino(caspershouse.com) noticed a change in the C# using statement between Beta 1 and Beta 2 of VS 2005. Here's the full story ... I n V1 and V1.1, the C# compiler accepted only types implementing IDisposable in using statements. In Beta1...

Hey Folks, I just wanted to let you all know that I'm busy working on getting Whidbey out and into your hot little hands and I won't have time to post here for a few weeks. Cheers, Peter

The C# team is hosting a chat about the C# language design on April 21st. This is a great opportunity to find out more abouthow and why the C# language works the way it does. Find more info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/

Luca Bolognese, our intrepid C# compiler PM, posted some interesting Nullable info http://blogs.msdn.com/lucabol/archive/2005/01/20/357353.aspx .

There has been some discussion(http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=cdaf30a6-a601-43d7-8565-7096f82851ba) on whether T?, aka Nullable<T>, should implement the same interfaces as the underlying type T. At first...

I just submitted another update to my command line parser on gotdotnet. It should be available in a couple of days. This update adds better support for default values, and cleans up the names a bit. Thanks to Erik Mikkelson for the inspiration. I've also...

I finally got around to updating my command line parser on gotdotnet. I can't believe its been over a year. This update adds support for customizable help text, formatting of help text to the console window width, and better support for /?. Thanks go...

Brad Abrams posted a blog(http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/10/05/238446.aspx) on field initializers and static constructors yesterday. In the VS2005 Beta the C# compiler added an optimization for instance field initializers which get assigned...

Back, Back, way Back ... 2 years ago when we started thinking about what Whidbey should be, I spent some time thinking about what makes a good feature for C# and Visual Studio, and what our focus should be for the product. I captured my thoughts in 2...