Just joined the Engineering Excellence team at Microsoft.

A number of people (see this and this for starters) have reported weird behaviour with ComponentCheck.exe which is used as the prerequisite checker for the VSTO Office 2007 PIA redistributable package that was added in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. For those...

Some items on VSTO compatibility including my own compatibility matrix : My article on the subject A MSDN article on this subject Another MSDN article on related subject matter

Well, first of all I started as a part-time graduate student at the University of Washington in the Professional Master's Program in computer science and engineering. This is very exciting and I'm learning a lot of interesting things particularly in the...

So, I decided that Objective-C is not that interesting for the time being. I thought I'd play with F# instead. More on this later…

I switched on my Mac for the first time in about three months this evening. I had a hankering to do some Objective-C. This is a language I've tried to master before but without huge amounts of success. However, with my renewed interest in late binding...

So I thought long and hard about my initial stab at a multimethod implementation for C#. It was a reasonable proof of concept. However, I read some more on the subject of multiple dispatch and the visitor pattern and came up with a few additional ideas...

I read a couple of interesting articles on the subject of multiple dispatch last night. The first, entitled Visitor Pattern Considered Useless , starts by describing the visitor design pattern with particular emphasis on how it can enable the definition...

Windows Installer APIs tamed in managed code: use this to dump out a list of all installed product codes and component IDs. Quick and easy. Good night everybody!

Firstly, it's election day so get out there and vote! Secondly, I went to bed last night and dreamt about functors! Last Friday I code-reviewed some changes made by one of my colleagues and his code just happened to use some STL containers and all sorts...

So, I did a whole lot more research and investigation of COM eventing in Office applications and how this compares to the "general" COM eventing case. Check out IConnectionPoint and .NET or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Managed Event Sinks...

A few things occurred to me the other day while I was playing around with my COM connection point code and I realized that my article contains a number of errors. I intend to correct these some time and then I'll republish it as soon as possible. Please...

My first article ( IConnectionPoint and .NET ) is a multi-part discussion contrasting .NET delegate-style event handling with classic COM IConnectionPoint eventing from managed code. Excel is my choice of victim application.

My name's Richard and I'm a developer in the Visual Studio Tools for Office team at Microsoft.