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Tuesday, June 10, 2008 12:41 AM

Updated MSDN forums

The MSDN forums are updated and have a new look and feel. It's at a new link too: http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/netfxtoolsdev/threads/ (the old link still forwards).
Posted by jmstall | 1 Comments
Friday, May 23, 2008 1:01 AM

Stuff in Reflection that's not in Metadata

Previously, I mentioned some things in Metadata that aren't exposed in Reflection . Here's an opposite case. While metadata represents static bits on disk, Reflection operates in a live process with access to the CLR's loader. So reflection can represent
Posted by jmstall | 0 Comments
Monday, May 19, 2008 4:46 PM

Nice MSDN URLs

I noticed that MSDN finally has nice URLs for the BCL. (Or perhaps that should be "I finally noticed that ...", depending on how long this has been) So instead of: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1009fa28.aspx You can do: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.assembly.loadfrom.aspx
Posted by jmstall | 1 Comments
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 1:03 AM

The price of complexity

My house was haunted. One of the lights would randomly go on or off and random times without anybody fiddling the switch. The previous owner of our house had installed fancy dimmer light switches. On a whim, we replaced one of the fancy switches with
Posted by jmstall | 4 Comments
Saturday, April 12, 2008 12:22 AM

Codegen for On Error Resume Next

VB has a " On Error Resume Next ", which tells each line to swallow exceptions and just keep executing to the next line. It's kind of like a try-catch around every single line. It may be tempting for C++ developers to make fun of VB for this, but this
Posted by jmstall | 3 Comments
Wednesday, April 02, 2008 11:35 PM

The waiting game

Punting on a problem can be good or bad, depending on the situation. Punting is not always retreating or surrendering. Punting is good when the problem will be easier to solve later. For example, maybe you suspect something may happen that will render
Posted by jmstall | 0 Comments
Thursday, March 27, 2008 10:11 PM

Understand the end-to-end scenarios

If you don't understand the end-to-end scenario, it's easy to do something that is ultimately self-defeating. For example, my 3yr old daughter recently learned to play hide-and-seek . The goal of the game is to hide and avoid being found while the "it"
Posted by jmstall | 1 Comments
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Saturday, March 22, 2008 10:53 PM

Sometimes it's the obvious answer

Sometimes the answer to a question is so obvious that we skip over it looking for a fancier answer. Example: A chair at my house had a bunch of little indentations on the seat - kind of like what you'd expect if somebody took a math compass and poked
Posted by jmstall | 1 Comments
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Monday, March 17, 2008 9:00 AM

Arguing by-example vs. by-principle

You can argue by providing examples supporting your case. Alternatively, you can argue by appealing to more general principles. For example, in arguing that "exposing public fields is bad," you could say: By-principle: "It breaks abstraction and encapsulation."
Posted by jmstall | 1 Comments
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Saturday, March 15, 2008 12:28 AM

Things in Metadata that are missing in Reflection

System.Reflection is a high-level way of describing Types in .NET targetted at managed code consumers. The API is easy to use, but does not expose all the information that's actually present and affecting decisions. For example, Reflection does not expose
Posted by jmstall | 1 Comments
Monday, March 10, 2008 9:36 PM

Binary vs. Source compatibility

Binary Compatibility means that when something is updated, you continue to work without needing to even recompile. Source Compatibility means that you need to recompile to keep things working, but you don't have to actually change the sources. One is
Posted by jmstall | 2 Comments
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 2:14 PM

Do you compile XML to IL?

We need some customer feedback to determine if we fix a regression that was added in VS2008. Any language can target the CLR by compiling the language to IL, and then you immediately leverage the .NET platform, including access to the libraries and debugging
Posted by jmstall | 16 Comments
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008 1:54 AM

Why are you caching data?

There are multiple reasons to cache data. For example, are you caching because of a performance issue of because of a correctness issue? Know which, and comment it at the spot doing the cache. If it's performance, the idea is that you have some expensive
Posted by jmstall | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008 8:10 AM

Why threading is hard

Anybody who says "I can write correct multi threaded code" probably should be saying "I don't test my multi-threaded code". It is very difficult to write correct multi-threaded code. One way to appreciate this is various "find-the-bug" pop quizzes that
Posted by jmstall | 8 Comments
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Monday, January 28, 2008 11:15 PM

Quiz: can you count how many combinations ...

Here's a combinatorics quiz: If you have 2 ordered lists (lengths N, M), how many ways can they be interleaved into a single list while still preserving the partial ordering from the original lists? So if the lists were: List 1: A,B List 2: X,Y The following
Posted by jmstall | 10 Comments
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