Stephen Toub

In many concurrent systems, one thread performs some work, the result of which another thread consumes. This producer/consumer pattern is frequently implemented on top of blocking queues. If you examine the behavior of System.Collections.Queue and...

With the source code for Microsoft Sudoku released on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dntablet/html/tbconSudokuSampleFinal.asp , you can take the code and modify it to your liking, adding features, putting a new UI on the game for different...

I've received a bunch of emails over the past week from people asking if I have a version of Sudoku.exe that runs on non-Tablet PCs. I tell them yes, and I tell them that they do, too :) Sudoku.exe references and uses types from Microsoft.Ink.dll,...

I’m an honest person. I value truth, sincerity, and candor. I appreciate people who are honest with me and honest with others. And I’m pretty sure that most people in this world feel the same way. Why is it, then, that it’s considered acceptable by the...

I know this will be extremely short lived, but I experience this phenomenon so rarely that I felt compelled to share its beauty with the world:

Some of the hardest bugs to discover are those involved in features that contain intentionally random behavior. Sudoku was originally written using System.Random as its source of randomness. As is described in the article about its development, this...

In my last post , I took a look at implementing blocking queues in .NET using semaphores (both System.Threading.Semaphore and a managed semaphore implementation). I defined a blocking queue as one that blocked on a dequeue operation until an item could...

The May 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/05 . Enjoy, Steve

A few people have asked me if it's possible to use Microsoft Sudoku to solve puzzles other than the ones it creates, such as the ones in daily newspapers. Yes, it is! (However, a few lines of code are required to enable this feature.) The code you...

I posted a couple of weeks ago with some reviews of the production of "Urinetown: The Musical" running in Chicago. It continues to receive rave reviews from the Chicago area press, and I've kept that blog post up-to-date with all of the reviews I know...