Section: Blogs

Debugging Guide now available

Mar 10, 2004 1 min.

Min Kwan Park, who works in QA on the C# team (responsible for debugger features) has compiled an amazing document for troubleshooting debugging issues in Visual Studio 2002 and 2003 … check it out here

Anson Horton starts his blog with talk of Intellisense

Mar 10, 2004 1 min.

Anson, a PM on the IDE team of C#, discusses the different ways that Intellisense is used and the design decisions that need to be made to keep it useful for developers. One of the features that we continually get positive comments on is IntelliSense. More specifically, virtually every user that we talk to likes completion lists. Interestingly, when asked about it most users say that they like IntelliSense because it helps them type.

C# Team Blogs as OPML

Mar 9, 2004 1 min.

Gus Perez has been maintaining an up-to-date list of C# team blogs, but after carefully duplicating his categorization in SharpReader, I thought I would try putting it up as an OPML file… You can grab it from here, and import it into your RSS Aggregator of choice… enjoy _(oh, and I ran into the oddest behaviour when posting this… putting the file up as .opml was causing IE to crash when I tried to view it, Front Page was refusing to edit it and I have no idea why.

Neat little utility (with C# source) that copies and pastes files from the command line

Mar 9, 2004 1 min.

Gus Perez has posted the binary and source for a little utlity he has dubbed “ezClip”; Back in the 7.0 days I wrote a little tool called ezClip. It’s sole purpose was to allow me to copy/paste files from one command prompt window to another. Our test tree can get pretty deep directory-wise and having to provide full paths to ‘copy’ was a pain and instead I often ended up starting up two explorers, one from each window, and then copying via the GUI.

Matt Warren on Language Design

Mar 9, 2004 1 min.

Matt provides us with some insights into the world of language design, a field that most of us have only dabbled in via a university course, with his discussion of keywords, operators and the problems with extending an existing programming language after its original release. It amazes me how difficult it is to design new features to a programming language. Once a language is baked in its original form it’s almost impossible to add new semantics let alone syntax rules.

New MSDE Articles Available

Mar 9, 2004 1 min.

Brian Randell has written 4 (really 7, but 3 of them are just the same article as both VB and C#) articles on using MSDE in your applications… (via Kent Sharkey’s blog); Using MSDE? A whole whack of articles from Brian Randell on working with MSDE in your Web applications has just gone live. [Using MSDE 2000 in a Web Application](http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/using/understanding/data/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnmsde2kwrk/html/msde2000webapp.asp) And every possible combination and permutation of: Visual Basic .

Scott Nonnenberg dishes on Visualizers in Whidbey

Mar 8, 2004 1 min.

Scott goes into detail on the cool “Visualizers” feature of the Whidbey debugger in his post “visualizers for PDC Whidbey”; Visualizers are custom viewers meant to be used at debug-time. They are entirely managed, and associated with particular types. Where before DataSet was a horrible mess in the watch window, now the standard DataGrid can be used to view the previously inaccessible data contained therein.

Grant Richins discusses Anonymous Methods

Mar 8, 2004 1 min.

Grant starts on what appears to be a series of posts about a new C# language feature, with “Anonymous Methods, Part 1 of ?” So what are anonymous methods? It is a way of writing an unnamed nested method that, just like most languages that have nested methods, allows access to all of the outer method’s locals and parameters, including the ‘this’ parameter.

Gregg Miskelly on Debugging Interop Issues

Mar 8, 2004 1 min.

Gregg discusses “Why interop debugging is difficult”… The Visual Studio debugger supports debugging both .NET code and native code at the same time. We call this ‘interop’. At first glance, this might not seem like much of an accomplishment. After all, we support debugging .NET code well enough, and we support debugging native code. What’s so hard about doing both at the same time?