Thottam R. Sriram

COM interoperability is a very powerful feature in the CLR that bridges the gap between native and managed code. It lets you reuse your existing COM and non-COM native DLL in the managed environment easily. It also lets native code call back to managed...

I came across this issue recently. I was trying to access CreateProcess using DLLImport from managed code using C# and VB.Net. Here is my code from C#: using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; public...

When we have C# code interacting with the data base you run into this problem. Let me try and explain it. The database has nullable columns and C# has nullable types. For example, let us take a table Employee which has Id (int), name (string) and age...

I ran into this problem recently when debugging some native code and thought that it will be good to share this with everyone . CString sampleString = CString(_T( "Sample\0String" ), 14); int len = sampleString.GetLength(); // len is 14 CString...

We used this feature to solve a problem internally and I was tempted to blog about this cool feature. Type forwarding allows you to move a type from one assembly to another without having to recompile the application that uses the original assembly. ...

When I read through the responses for the questionnaire below I saw that many users were not aware of MDA’s and that drove the topic for this post. I had written a small sample for a simple MDA which I thought that I will share with everyone. MDA...

The CLR binder today allows you to either accidentally or intentionally load two versions of a given assembly in an AppDomain. The pain point of this design is that it fails at run time when specific operations are performed with respect to types that...

I want to share with you this sample that demonstrates how to version an assembly. An AssemblyIdentity consists of five parts: AssemblyName Public key Version Culture Processor Architecture How do you specify all of these...

To continue on the exception post from last week I did a bit more research and learnt some more. I thought that I will share that with everyone. We had some interesting conversations in our team about exception handling and the following thought came...

I tried writing a sample to use managed C++ to interact with managed code and here is my learning. I created the following managed C++ code to wrap existing FLAT API’s in a class that can be called form C#. Managed C++ code: #using <mscorlib...

I still remember us planning for this event a few months back. It started off as a small group of people wanting to reinvent the then compiler labs into something bigger. The goal was to get all the right people in a room and have great speakers talk...

When you override a property using new with a new type there is discrepancy in behavior from C# and reflection. C# is not aware of the property in the base class and it has been overridden by the new property. But reflection is well aware of both the...

. NET exposes an elegant diagnostics model that can be used by applications. It is a bit confusing to start with. There are a few listeners that exist in the Diagnostics namespace. Some of them are 1. TextWriterTraceListener 2. DefaultTraceListener...

The GetRaiseMethod returns null for all events declared with the event keyword as explained in the MSDN help. The documentation apparently is not as verbose as it should have been and we will work on that. The documentation around this is extremely confusing...

I came across this interesting scenario when I was looking into some issues. In a normal method you can pass the derived class instance when a base class instance is expected. In the example below passing dc1 to Method1 shows that you can indeed pass...

I wanted to take a very simple console application and use ntsd with SOS to debug it. The example demonstrated very simple operations as setting a break point, viewing the managed stack, stack variables, object instance etc. We can go deeper into...

I wanted to set a conditional break point from managed code and it was hard to do that using SOS. In the sample below, let us assume that I want to break in to the method ThreadMethod when a specific thread tries to access it. I want to thank Varun Sekhri...

I wanted to write another small sample to demonstrate how you can use ilasm to modify a compiled assembly. The sample is very simple, but demonstrates the concept well. Let us take App.cs which contains the following code: using System; public...

Fusion log comes in very handy when you want to understand or debug binding behaviors. Let us take the sample code below. Copy the code to DomSample.cs and compile it. Let us assume for now that the code tries to load some arbitrary assembly “Foo” which...

There are four ways to throw an exception in my opinion. They are: 1. Throw a new exception a. throw new ArgumentException( … ); 2. Throw the exception you caught a. throw e; 3. Throw the same exception preserving the stack a. throw;...

I spent sometime to understand CodeDOM and in the process wrote a sample which will help me understand this technology better. I wanted to share the sample I wrote with everyone so that it can be helpful for people getting introduced to this powerful...

I took the sample from my previous post and wanted to use LINQ to query the XML. You can pretty much use the power of SQL on the document object to richly query for things you are looking for. using System; using System.Linq; using System...

I was debugging some issue related to asynchronous delegates and wanted to share that information with everyone. When you do a BeginInvoke the delegate is invoked on a thread from the thread pool and on completion the callback is also called on...

I want to talk about Xml Serialization this month. One of the work I was involved in recently required generation of XML and a I came across this wonderful technology which helps you generate and consume XML seamlessly. If you are generating XML...

A static constructor is called when a direct access to any static member of the class is made. The static constructor cannot be used to create an instance of the class. The following example demonstrates this clearly. When you reflect for constructors...