Srivatsn's Blog

Ah.. It’s such a relief to be able to finally talk about it I’ve been working on getting Visual Basic supported in the Windows Phone development tools. It’s been hard to not talk about it, especially when I’d seen comments from users like “The phone dev...

Adrian Collier has just blogged about the release of the Solution Navigator extension for VS 2010 . One of the things I hate about Visual Studio is the number of tool windows that I have to juggle around. I have two big monitors at work and I still run...

Visual Basic generally goes out of its way to help out the programmer. Delegate relaxation is a good example of this need to please. Simply put, this feature is about being able to assign to delegates when the signatures don’t exactly match. The canonical...

My last post was in September 2008. It’s been close to two years since I posted anything. My rationalization for such unforgivable behaviour is that I started working on a project that wasn’t public at that time. This was an incubation effort and I was...

With 2.0 Beta 5 coming out very soon, there is a new hosting helper class in there called IronPython.Hosting.Python . It has a few helper methods to create a ScriptRuntime or ScriptEngine and adds some Python-specific extension methods to ScriptRuntime...

In Python one can call functions with either the argument itself or a named argument i.e f(3) or f(x=3). Python also provides syntax to absorb excess arguments for either style of argument passing with either * or **. So for example for this function...

The ability to compile IronPython scripts into .NET IL and to save them to disk existed in IronPython 1.0 but has been missing in 2.0 so far. With IronPython 2.0 Beta4 this has been added back. Why would I compile dynamic language scripts? There are a...

The next stop on the path to IronPython 2.0 is Beta 3 and we pushed it out today. You can get the sources and binaries of IronPython here . As Jimmy mentioned in his release notes for Dynamic Silverlight last week, this release also contains the sources...

Today I got a question by e-mail from someone who wanted to implement something like this MSDN article in IronPython. The gist of the article is that there is a property called ObjectForScripting on a WinForms WebBrowser control. If one sets the property...

Say you want to interop with a .NET library but you also want it to behave like objects in dynamic languages do. You want to be able to add/delete methods/properties to the object dynamically. In python you can do something like this: class x(object...

I finally got a second monitor recently and set it up as an extended desktop. While I’m very happy with all the extra real-estate goodness I’m pretty miffed that my apps now have lost two magic corners. I’m referring here to Fitts’ law and its implications...

PyCon 2008 was a lot of fun. This was my first PyCon and until now my interaction with the python community had been nothing beyond a few mails in the IronPython forum. My experiences of conferences so far has been limited to Microsoft ones like TechEd...

We have this really cool tool that parses a python file into a AST and then morphs it according to some transformation and then spits out python code corresponding to the new AST. I've been playing around with it lately to come up with some transformations...

There's been a lot of talk lately about the DeepZoom technology in Silverlight 2. If you have seen it yet you should definitely goto HardRock's memorabilia site. That is a 2 billion pixels image that you see in that 640X480 segment there. Instead of getting...

Have you ever looked at the remote connection options in windows and thought that there is something off about the order of the options listed there. Here is the dialog: You have the most secure>less secure> more secure. Or if you look it at another...

Charlie Calvert blogged about dynamic support in C# 4.0 . I love this for two reasons. One it will enable dynamic language interop and COM automation interop in a much better way, and two it will use the DLR. So if you were writing COM automation interop...

I've been dabbling with IronPython for the past two weeks now. For me it compares quite favourably to the experience I had driving in this country. I used to drive a manual transmission car back in India and I used C# primarily. When I came to the US...

For the past two years, I'd been working on the Record-and-play feature of Visual Studio Team Test which has been announced with the Rosario CTP . Abhinaba and Anu have blogged about these features here and here . It was quite a pain not being able to...

WinFx has been renamed to .NET 3.0 . I think this is one of the smartest moves from the branding team in a long time. There was just too much confusion even within Developer Division. I’ve heard questions like do I have to install two separate frameworks...

Custom Build providers have been the prerogative of ASP.NET 2.0 developers so far. ASP.NET has a far superior compile model compared to the traditional WinForms apps. You can register a build provider for an extension and when you add a file with that...

I installed the January CTP of Sparkle (also known by the more boring name Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer) today and I must say I’m really thrilled. I really like this separation of the responsibilities of a designer and a developer or...

Yesterday, I was a happy man. Apple had announced their first MacTels and that meant that I could finally get to work with my favourite software on my favourite hardware . I was finally going to retire my iMac G5 and relieve myself of the frustration...

Using an IDE, especially one like VS.NET 2005, has its faults. You get used to intellisense so much that when that little list doesn’t pop up you feel righteous anger. So, one of the first things I did when I started writing custom tasks for MSBuild was...

I recently wrote some code which needed to install a low-level global mouse hook. I promptly did a MSN search and came up with two good articles on the subject – a KB article and a MSDN mag article . So, I religiously copy-pasted the code from the KB...

If you have ever tried to customize a Build Type in TeamBuild, you have probably come across or heard about this file - Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets. What is this file? This is the file that defines the entire build process. All the steps...