I wish I could remember where I first read it because perhaps it deserves attribution. But many years ago I read about the two world views of physicists and they resonated with me. One world view is that prescibed by things like General Relativity and...

I still get questions that amount to "should I ngen my <something>" from time to time and the best answer I can give is still "it depends." I wrote this article many years ago, and I'd say it's still pretty accurate: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom...

This series can still be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649152.aspx While some of the content is stale since it refers specifically to .NET 2.0 I think all of the conceptual content broadly applicable (even beyond managed...

Many problems you will face are actually the building data access layer, sometimes thinly disguised, sometimes in your face; it’s one of the broad patterns that you see in computer science – as the cliché says: it keeps rearing its...

I can’t say I’ve asked the framework guidelines folks about this but I’m fairly sure there would be a lot of agreement from the guidelines gurus; so in the spirit of approximately correct advice I give you Rico’s Guidelines for...

Many of you have commented that I've been kind of quiet lately. This was largely a reflection of my job, I was working on an internal team that I could not write much about for the last couple of years. I had a great experience there but that trek is...

I know I haven't posted for a while; I'm hoping that will change soon. However in the mean time my daughter forwarded me this link because she thought it was cute. The thing is, she didn't realize it should be my theme song. http://www.youtube.com...

I don’t know that it is possible to write anything like a unitary software system in a way that is truly loosely coupled. It’s not that you can’t make boxes and lines that are cleanly separated in all sorts of pretty ways, though that’s...

I was lamenting that we haven't really done terribly much to make multi-threaded debugging easier in say the last decade and I was fortunate enough to be able to have a conversation with Brain Crawford about it. Brian is a long-time friend an colleague...

It’s been a long time since I included my “this discussion is only approximately correct” disclaimer so I’ll just preface it here. In the interest of space and clarity, this discussion is only approximately correct. OK, now we can move on… I love micro...

Visual Studio 2010 Launched on Monday . Wow! It’s HUGE. A major round of congratulations are in order for everyone involved, not just on the Visual Studio team but also on the Frameworks team and the supporting teams and of course the customers whose...

I’m not especially a great fan of micro-benchmarks, they’re handy as a compliment to the larger tests but I often find that they lead to confusion because they are interpreted as reflecting reality when nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact...

I try to keep the content on this blog strictly professional (although sometimes it's like an editorial but at least it's topical) About once a year I break down and write something that's basically just some personal thing I felt like sharing. This is...

I like processes that simply drop-dead fail when they have an unrecoverable fault. Trying to continue is often dangerous and unlikely to actually help anyone. This policy is all fine and well but in all cases it is vital that the “death” stack of a process...

Just a quick plug, if you missed the VSX conference you can see it all online on Channel 9. Some great talks including my keynote speech on VS Futures.

Just a few words of encouragement today: I can't emphasize enough how valueable your feedback is to us at this point; no matter how hard we try we simply cannot duplicate the diversity that is the real world. We need to know what's really working out...

After my keynote speech yesterday at the Development Tools Ecosystem Summit Charles Torre caught up with me and we made this video. Hot off the presses: Rico Mariani: Inside Visual Studio Beta 2 - Performance and Reliability It's super-exciting :)...

[All the other Parts: History of Visual Studio ] [Visit the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta web site for the latest info] Visual Studio 2008 Winds Down, Visual Studio 2010 Begins Just as things were starting to wind down...

[All the other Parts: History of Visual Studio ] In the last posting I talked about the “Whidbey” release, VS2005, but I feel like I left out two really important aspects so I’d like to start this part by rewinding a bit for those...

[All the other Parts: History of Visual Studio ] I can’t really talk about what was going on in the IDE without covering what was happening in the runtime because their fates are so intertwined, so even though it’s off topic a little bit...

[All the other Parts: History of Visual Studio ] [I know I promised to talk about “Whidbey” in this installment but I realized I needed a bridge to get there or else I’d totally skip over “Everett” – so this is that...

[All the other Parts: History of Visual Studio ] The years 1998 to 2002 were very busy ones in the Developer Division. I’ve previously written about “Dolphin” and I tried to give a sense of exactly how much changed during the Dolphin...

[All the other Parts: History of Visual Studio ] We’re still on the part of the story where I was off working in MSN which means all I can give you are the first- and second-hand stories that I’ve heard over the years. So I guess that makes...

[All the other Parts: History of Visual Studio ] I didn’t really intend to write one of these per day but here it is day 4 and we’re still going strong. I’d like to take a moment to thank the many people who commented on this series...

[All the other Parts: History of Visual Studio ] I was going to go forward again in this installment but I got some requests to talk about some older things again before I did that. You might be getting bored of the distant past so I’ll try to...