Alright, first of all, what are Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs), and why am I devoting an entire post to the pains caused by deploying these things? And secondly, how do they relate with what we’ve been talking about thus far? The answer to the second...

Not too long ago, I did another Channel 9 video on Dynamic in C# with another compiler dev, Chris Burrows. In this video, we discuss the making of dynamic, as well as some of the drawbacks, design decisions, and philosophies behind the feature. Enjoy...

One of the things I love about my job is that I get to make people happy. How do I do that? By giving them what they want of course! One of the things I don’t like so much about my job is going back on a decision that we made before, and having to revert...

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve last posted! Don’t worry, I’m still alive and kickin’, and we’re still workin’ on cool stuff for y’all to use. Let’s take a bit of a recap of how far we’ve come. We’ve chatted about dynamic binding in C# and how that...

Okay, my attempt at a clever title failed… Ties and Philosophers? I oughtta stick with technical writing. :) We’re almost done with our chat about named and optional arguments. We’ve covered what the feature is about , and covered overload resolution...

Last time we talked about the basics of named arguments, optional arguments, and default values . From here on out, I’m just going to refer to the whole feature group as “named and optional arguments” – it’s just too much typing otherwise (we actually...

C# 4.0 introduces the concept of optional parameter values into the language. Now, this has been a controversial subject in the past, and we have had many requests for the feature, but have traditionally stayed away from it. So, why now? Well, before...

By now, my hope is that you all have a well-rounded view of dynamic. We started this series by introducing dynamic and talking about the basics of the feature , and have just finished talking about some of the feature's limitations with the intent that...

As I mentioned last time , there are a few gotchas that we'll need to look at in order to get a full understanding of the dynamic feature and its capabilities. Today we'll take a look at some of those limitations. As we go along, I'll try to shed some...

Now that we're all experts in how dynamic invocations work for regular method calls, lets extrapolate from our previous discussion about phantom methods a bit and take a look at how those basic concepts apply to other dynamic operations. Today we'll just...

Yes, this does sound like a Star Wars movie, but no, I'm not a Star Wars geek that just likes to pull lines from my favorite movies (though I rather enjoyed Star Wars). This post will deal with what we've coined "the phantom method". It's the...

Last time we dealt with the basics of dynamic binding . This time, we'll add a small twist. First, lets recall the example we were using last time: static void Main( string [] args) { dynamic d = 10; C c = new C(); // (1) Dynamic receivers. ...

A few weeks ago, a few of us on the compiler team did a Channel9 interview, discussing some of the new features that we're working on and how they fit into the whole Visual Studio 2010 story. The video is now online ! In it, we talk in quite length about...

Last time , we began to dive into dynamic binding in C# and what happens through the pipeline. This time, we'll take a simple scenario and pick apart the details of what happens under the covers, both during compile time and runtime. We can break down...

The other day I was playing around with some office code, and I found myself writing a lot of code much like the following sample that Anders used at his PDC talk : static void Main( string [] args) { var xl = new Excel .Application(); (( Excel...

The cat's out of the bag! Hours ago at PDC '08 , I got to watch Anders unveiled the new C# 4.0 language features that we've been working on. This unveiling was accompanied by some fantastic demos of our work in action. Even though I've been working on...

I got the opportunity to give a talk at the SoCal CodeCamp 08 this past weekend, and its driven me back to blogging. Its been just over 8 months since my last post - these 8 months have been spent with my head down working on Visual Studio 2010 , the...

Optional Modifiers (or modopts ) are CLR constructs that allow types to be annotated with optional information. This allows compiler writers to annotate their types with additional information that may not have a direct CLR representation. The managed...

Last time we talked about generic method substitutions which resulted in types being declared with more than one method with identical constructed signatures. After thinking long and hard about this problem, we've come to a conclusion as to how to resolve...

It's been a while since I've last written - my apologies. We've been hard at work figuring out what the next release of C# will look like, and I'm happy to say that I'm very excited about what we're working on. Great minds are at work figuring out things...

On December 19th, we officially announced that VS 2008 is released to manufacturing! This is the first release of the product (of any product for that matter) that I've worked heavily on, so I'm quite anxious to see the feedback on the work that we've...

Technorati Tags: Events One of the things that the language designers considered when designing the C# language was the ability to notify external callers of certain events happening. To solve this problem, they (surprise surprise) introduced the event...

In my previous post, Compiler-generated scopes for local variable declarations , I briefly touched on the issue of multiple meanings applied to the same name. In this post, I'll aim to flush out the compiler's rules with regards to binding names in their...

I was tasked with understanding and fixing a bug on error reporting with foreach iteration variables the other day, and it got me thinking about local variable scoping rules in C# in general. First, the bug. The Bug Consider the following code: class...

Hi there. My name is Sam Ng, and I'm a developer on the C# compiler team. This here's my little outlet of random stuff that I think about, and things that I learn as I dig deeper into the wonderful world of software. Who am I? I'm currently a developer...