Code/Tea/Etc... : CSharp Featured Team Posts

This blog has moved... notice #2...

Duncanma — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 05:17:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma

following the 3 leaf model when they moved, I thought I should post this notice a couple of times...

"Express Paint" article up...

Duncanma — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:56:00 GMT

This article, by John Kennedy, discusses the creation of an image editing application completely built with C# Express Edition.

ExpressPaint
Summary: Use C# Express to create an image processing application that's ideal for putting the final touch to your digital photographs. This program is easy to expand with your own unique touches. (6 printed pages)

Enjoy!

Luke Hoban blogs on...

Duncanma — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 05:51:00 GMT

Luke, a PM on the C# IDE team has started a blog... should be a good source of info, especially around the new Express Edition.

Intro + C# Express
... The project that I’ve been working on for most of my time at Microsoft is the Visual C# Express Edition. So as you can probably guess, I’m really excited that the betas of the Express editions are now available for download. It’s been really great seeing all the feedback we’ve already received on the Express idea after less than 48 hours. ...

Eric Gunnerson discusses grouping classes within an assembly...

Duncanma — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 06:36:00 GMT

As a big fan of components, my applications are often composed of many different assemblies... essentially I break out anything that seems 'ready to reuse'... but perhaps I should reconsider?

Grouping classes in an assembly

This useful bit of information crossed my desk today:

When it comes to packaging in separate assemblies, remember that you pay a fairly large performance hit on an assembly load. An assembly should really be considered a unit of security control, independent versioning, or contribution from disparate sources. You might consider placing code in a separate assembly if it is used extremely rarely, but probably not.

continued in the full post...

Andy Pennell and Scott Nonnenberg are looking for your opinion...

Duncanma — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 05:06:00 GMT

Debugger Window Menu Items: Where should they be?
The VS debugger since 7.0 has put most debugger windows on the Debug menu, under the Windows sub-menu. I say 'most' because the Output window lives on the View menu, under Other Windows sub-menu.
Where do you expect debugger windows to be on the menu? (Ignore Output for now, we intend to fix that one independent of this). Your choices are:
Where they have been since 7.0 (ie under Debug/Windows)
Where every other window is (ie under View/Debugger Windows)?
We can't agree, so need the communities feedback.

If you have an opinion on this (I'm for #2 myself), chime in on the comments to Andy's post.

Greggm describes how to debug ASP.NET as a non-admin...

Duncanma — Sun, 06 Jun 2004 05:46:00 GMT

For most folks working with ASP.NET, this should be taken as essential information... Don't let the Whidbey reference in the first paragraph fool you, by the way, this post describes how to accomplish debugging as a non-admin in Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Debugging an ASP.NET application as a non-admin
The debugger team has gotten many requests to debug ASP.NET applications as a non-admin. In Whidbey, the ASP.NET team did a good job solving this problem. Their solution is much nicer then mine. In the mean time, here is a way that you can get this scenario to work in the 7.1 IDE. I hope this helps. If it doesn't work for you, you can post a comment, but don't call PSS. This isn't supported....

Cyrus ruminates on the revelations of TechEd 2004...

Duncanma — Fri, 28 May 2004 01:34:00 GMT

Cyrus, recent addition to the C# bloggers list and poster of many posts, has been blogging extensively from TechEd...

OMGTHXURGR8!!!!
That's basically the message we got today concerning the work we're doing in the C# IDE for VS 2005. I ended up not being able to show people the new stuff on a person by person basis because we ended up getting too much of a backlog of people while that was happening. I ended up doing demos 10 people at a time instead. At first I thought it was because I had some awesome C# hats to give away, but then when people were staying even after I gave them out, I realized they were pretty psyched about the new features.

So many posts in so little time...

Duncanma — Mon, 17 May 2004 06:53:00 GMT

Cyrus (a developer with the C# IDE team) has obviously needed to blog for awhile, and when he finally did, he had a lot of material ready to go. Check out his 28 posts from the last 2 days!

Here's his first post:

First blog entry
A couple of week ago I worked with Jay and Kevin on a little mental exercise. It was a lot of fun to do and you can read about it here: LazyLoader
After that I found myself responding to several posters about design decisions we made and the usefulness of the library we'd written. I figured it was kind of silly to be having these conversations in the feedback section of another blog (especially as we were starting to branch out onto new topics). So it seemed natural to start my own blog at this point.

SteveJS discusses unmanaged/managed and mixed debugging in VS

Duncanma — Sat, 15 May 2004 07:33:00 GMT

Steve Steiner, a developer on the VS debugger team, fills us in on some of the differences between the different types of debugging that VS is capable of...

Unmanaged Debugging vs. Managed Debugging vs. Mixed Debugging.
All versions of VS support debugging both managed and unmanaged code. However there is a big difference between doing one or the other and doing both. GreggM has written about some of the reasons interop debugging is difficult. Here I will refer to debugging both managed and unmanaged at the same time as Mixed debugging.
If you are having stability problems when debugging, one reason may be you are doing Mixed debugging without realizing it....

Going way back here... but I don't think I mentioned this before.... Gus Perez posts a Snippet Editor...

Duncanma — Fri, 14 May 2004 08:38:00 GMT

Snippets are a pretty cool feature of VS 2005.... aka Intellitasks to some... and Gus has created a tool to make them... (well, he did back in March.... :))

Snippy - A C# code snippet editor
I made it my weekend project to hack up an editor for code snippet files. If you don't know what code snippets are, you should check out these two entries by Shaykat and Anson. Shaykat provides a good overview of them in general and Anson touches on them a bit more and shows an example of what the XML for these looks like.

Eric Gunnerson discusses Enums, Validation and Versioning...

Duncanma — Tue, 11 May 2004 07:03:00 GMT

Giving us an early peek at his TechEd 2004 talk, Eric discusses how to handle enums in your code, since they are not constrained to the list of options you define in the enum and also because they can change in ways that could break your code in the future...

Enums and validation
... So, my first point is that enums are not sets - they can take on any value from the underlying type. ...

Grant discusses Iterators...

Duncanma — Sat, 08 May 2004 05:54:00 GMT

I've often had email exchanges and thought about posting them as blog entries... and now I've seen someone do it... and I have to say that it is a little hard to read (for the email part, start at the bottom and read up... which is normal for email, but not intuitive in a blog posting)... That difficulty is worth going through though because if you read the entire post you'll find out lots of useful info... :)

More thoughts on Iterators
... This got me thinking some more about iterators. The frameworks often use an int as a version field to detect when a collection has changed. This seems like a bit of overkill and isn't 100% correct because it does suffer from wrap-around (although that is almost entirely impossible short of malicious code). So I was wondering how you could write 100% correct code and still use an iterator, and have it be clean and maintainable code....

Eric is asking questions again...

Duncanma — Tue, 04 May 2004 08:43:00 GMT

This time, he wants to know what you think about C#'s community:

C# Community Review
... If a friend came up to you and said, “I'm thinking of using C#, but I'm concerned that there isn't a good community around it”, what would you say? What are the good things about the C# community? What are the bad things? If you wanted us to change one thing, what would it be? ...

Go on over there and let him know what you think!

Eric Gunnerson on Channel 9...

Duncanma — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 07:10:00 GMT

Two video interviews with Eric Gunnerson appeared on Channel 9 today:

Jay discusses the use of partial classes in Windows Forms 2.0

Duncanma — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 07:02:00 GMT

This new feature, which isn't limited to Windows Forms, allows a single class to extend across multiple files, isn't limited to Windows Forms but the designer-generated code is just screaming out for a solution like this.

Jay writes:

Winforms designed code and C# partial classes
In Whidbey, the WinForms designer takes advantage of a new C# language feature called “partial classes”. This allows them to pull out the designer generated code into a separate file. It has several advantages...