My latest .NET Matters column in MSDN Magazine is now available online . In it, I discuss one approach to implementing a BlockingStream and using it to implement a StreamPipeline class.

For those of you who haven't heard, we released a CTP of the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework. You can download it here , and you can learn more about it in the new Parallel Computing dev center on MSDN, as well as from the Parallel Extensions team blog . Enjoy! -Steve

My latest .NET Matters in MSDN Magazine is now online: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/11/NETMatters/default.aspx

My latest .NET Matters in MSDN Magazine is now online here . In it, I discuss what deadlocks are and ways to detect them when using monitors.

Several years ago, I wrote an article for MSDN on programming against the DVR-MS file format. I'm very pleased with how well the article was received, and to this day I get a lot of people writing to me about the article. Unfortunately, recently the article was removed from MSDN. Rather than spending...

It's been a while since I've added to this blog; been very busy with some really cool stuff at work (more about that soon). In the meantime, my latest .NET Matters column in MSDN Magazine is now online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/09/NETMatters/default.aspx (cowritten with Shawn Farkas...

Several months ago I updated my "Time Travel with Windows Media Center" article to be based on Windows Vista rather than on Windows XP. It's now online! If you're interested in writing background add-ins for Media Center, check it out at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb643809.aspx . Thanks...

If you've ever wondered how to handle window messages in .NET console applications, check out my latest .NET Matters column in the June 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine , which just went online an hour or so ago.

Thanks to everyone who attended my talks yesterday at DevConnections. For those of you who were at the talk on using managed code to access some of the native-only APIs in Vista, you can get the code samples I used for the demos here . The slides from both talks should be available on the conference...

At DevConnections this week, I wanted to demonstrate how easy it can be to write preview handlers for Windows Vista. Using the framework I created for my article in the January 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine , I whipped up this little guy: [PreviewHandler("MSDN Magazine DLL Preview Handler", ".dll", "{1A565B60...

In May 2006, I wrote a small digital imaging application to produce what I like to call the "Pleasantville" effect. If you've seen the movie, you can probably guess what I mean. An image will be mostly grayscale, but certain aspects of the image, either certain colors or certain regions, will remain...

John Robbins emailed me tonight to let me know that he found a bug with my PreviewHandlerAssociatedEditor tool with Vista running on x64. The tool first looks in the registry to see what handlers are available, and then it looks at all classes/extensions to see which have handlers registered with...

I've had several requests for the code for the PreviewHandlerAssociationEditor tool I put up a few weeks back to accompany my MSDN Magazine article on preview handlers . I've updated the download to include the source for the project. Enjoy!

Back in early 2005, I wrote an article for MSDN on implementing add-ins for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 . As part of that article, I implemented an add-in that made it easy to jump around in a recorded TV show, video, or music file using the remote control, simply by entering a time code using...

If you're getting an error with error code 2869 when installing the sample preview handlers associated with my preview handler article from the January 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine , make sure you're following the directions in the README file. Open a new console window with "Run as administrator". From...

For my article on preview handlers in the January 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine , I wrote a sample preview handler for previewing PDF files. This allows you to view PDF files in Outlook and in the Vista shell just as you would other document types for which there are built-in preview handlers, like for...

I received an email from MSDN Magazine subscriber Oren Novotny thanking me for my preview handler article in the January 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine . Oren also wondered whether a tool could be written to make it easy to edit preview handler registrations for particular extensions. For example, what...

I've received several emails from folks who have been successfully using my Outlook Calendar Provider and Outlook Contact Provider with Outlook 2003. Unfortunately, they upgrade to Outlook 2007, and their solutions break. This appears to be due to Outlook 2007 being more strict about the response it...

Several folks have asked me for my slides and code samples from both talks I gave at Visual Studio Connections last week. You can find them here: http://www.devconnections.com/updates/LasVegasFall_06/VS_Connections/Toub_VGN305_VSConnections_Fall2006.zip http://www.devconnections.com/updates/LasVegasFall_06...

The November 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/11 . This includes the November installment of my favorite column, .NET Matters , available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/11/NETMatters .

The October 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/10 . Enjoy! Steve

The September 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/09 . This includes the September installment of my favorite column, .NET Matters , available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/09/NETMatters .

I previously posted about translations of my Sudoku article into French and Spanish . Today I found it in Chinese and German , too!

I was chatting with a few Microsoft folks last week, and they asked me if they could get a discounted rate on MSDN Magazine. (Not that it's expensive to begin with; at $35 if you buy it through the MSDN Magazine Web site, and at $25 if you buy it through the offers typically distributed at conferences...

I found out this morning that my Sudoku article on MSDN has been translated into Spanish: http://www.microsoft.com/spanish/msdn/articulos/archivo/160506/voices/tbconSudokuSampleFinal.mspx Cool! Kudos to David Carmona Salas and his team for undertaking such a massive translation effort.