After 6 great years at Microsoft, my wife and I have decided it's time to spend some time living near our family in Ontario, Canada (we've got two young kids, and they're going to love seeing their grandparents and cousins more than twice a year). I've...

In this post , I mentioned that one way to use exception filters from C# code is to generate them with Reflection.Emit.  Personally I usually prefer static compilation (even post-build assembly merging or rewriting) – there’s really nothing here...

A co-worker asked me recently how he could predict where an exception that was about to be thrown would land while debugging a managed application.  The real answer to this question is “you can’t – step into the throw and see”.  The EH system...

I'm just finishing up my Masters in Computer Science, and was surprised when I recently got an assignment that involved parsing PDB files. Over the years I've been involved in many discussions about why the Microsoft PDB format isn't public. John Robbins...

There are a bunch of great new CLR v4-related video interviews up on Channel9. In particular: Jon, Thomas and Dave from my team (CLR diagnostics) discuss the advancements in debugging and profiling APIs in v4 Simon and I discuss in-process SxS...

Over the past few months I've had some interesting debates with folks here (and some customers) about the cost/benefit trade-off of "AnyCPU" (architecture-neutral) managed EXEs. I think we've converged on a consensus that most of the time they're not...

Herman Venter has just released his Common Compiler Infrastructure as an OpenSource project on Codeplex . CCI is a GREAT set of libraries for building, analyzing, and modifying .NET assemblies and PDB files - written entirely in C#. Several Microsoft...

Often, when an unexpected exception occurs in production code, applications want to generate (and potentially report) some sort of diagnostics information. Sometimes people just want to write to a log file (and perhaps pop some error dialog) for support...

We announced at PDC today that we're making some significant advances in diagnostics tool support for CLR v4! In particular, we've been investing heavily in improving our support for production diagnostics scenarios over the past couple years. I'm excited...

In my previous post I mentioned that CLR 4.0 will support managed dump debugging through ICorDebug, and that to do this we had to re-architect the debugging support in the CLR. I want to give you a little more detail about what we've been doing here....

In this blog entry , Mike describes that func-eval will fail when not a GC-safe point. In VS this results in the error "Cannot evaluate expression because a thread is stopped at a point where garbage collection is impossible, possibly because the code...

Method calls using the C# ‘ base ’ keyword get compiled to an IL ‘ call ’ instruction, rather than the ‘ callvirt ’ that is normally used . This is the one case in C# where a virtual method can be invoked without virtual dispatch. The CLR allows it to...

This is just a quick reminder that we're always looking for talented people who are passionate about programming languages, platforms and tools. We're working on a bunch of exciting things to make .NET programming more productive and enjoyable, and there...

I'm not one who believes mainstream large-scale software development really deserves the title of "computer science " (or "software engineering " for that matter). However, I have been thinking lately that there is an interesting analogy between good...

The System.Diagnostics.StackTrace class in .NET can be used to generate a textual representation of the current callstack. This is used, for example, by Exception.ToString() . If requested by the caller, StackTrace can include source file locations (file...

I’ve been playing around a bit lately with computational genomics (I’m doing a project for my parallel computation class). I wanted to write some simple algorithms that operate on potentially large amounts of DNA data without using a ton of RAM. For example...

In my entry on generic variance in the CLR , I said that you can’t convert a List<String> to a List<Object>, or even an IEnumerable<String> to IEnumerable<Object>. I should point out however that the real-world scenarios where...

Uwe Keim posted a thought provoking comment in response to my entry about Linq . Here is an excerpt: I do see the benefits, but I also have a big déjà vû: The C#-language seems to go the C++-way, where I, even after 10 years of programming, don...

Six months ago I posted a comparison of a simple select statement in C-omega vs. ADO.Net which some people found very exciting. Now that Linq has been officially unveiled, I figured I should update my comparison using C# 3.0 and DLinq . Although Linq...

Ever since I started planning for my users-group talk (and wrote this blog entry ) about data access with C-omega, I've been dying to tell everyone about the plans to add similar functionality to C#. For those of you at my talk, you'll remember this video...

In my last post I gave an overview of the DebuggableAttribute, what values the C# compiler gives it, and how the CLR uses those values. I mentioned that with /debug+, the C# compiler sets the IgnoreSymbolStoreSequencePoints DebuggingModes bit, but I didn...

Mike Stall has a great little sample showing how to make your dynamically generated code debuggable. However, there is one more detail you should be aware of. By default the JIT compiler will enable optimizations for the module, making debugging difficult...

One of our partners asked us how a .NET program can tell what the currently active “try” blocks are on the stack. This seemed like a dubious thing to want to do, but regardless a colleague of mine whipped up some sample code that uses the StackTrace class...

On Thursday I gave a .NET users group talk on Comega to somewhere around 100 .NET developers. Overall I think it went pretty well. I was nervous at first, but once I got into talking about the cool stuff I like I forgot about the pressure and had a good...

In a couple weeks, I'm doing a talk at a .NET users group in Ontario about Cω . Cω is a cool research language from Microsoft Research that extends C# with direct support for data access (SQL and XML) and concurrency abstractions. I’ve been planning on...