I bought a Western Digital 120 Gig external drive to use as a backup drive for my home system, and I'd like to use something nicer than Windows backup to do the backup. Here's what I'm looking for: Ability to backup 3 systems. Scheduled backup Reasonably priced Bonus if it only stores a single version of files that are shared across the systems.

I usually ignore the spam that I get (and I get a bunch), but I read one of them a bit more carefully: We hereby inform you that your computer was scanned under the IP 194.90.37.141 . The contents of your computer were confiscated as an evidence, and you will be indicated. Umm... I think that the author was probably looking...

Diego Mijelshon  asks Now that C# 2.0 is almost here, I'd like to know about features that were left out from this release and planned for the future. We are primarily focused on getting Whidbey polished and out the door right now, so there isn't a lot of thought about features beyond Whidbey right now. Even when we do get into that mode, I...

Moo asked: Why can't we have .Add and .Remove aswell as += and -= operations after all its just a collection, I was rather supprised that this method wasn't actually available for adding event handlers. One of our design goals is not to have more than one way of doing something (in contrast to Perl's tmtowtdi). If there are two different ways of...

Partial classes can be pretty cool because of the opportunities it gives in separating machine or designer generated code from user code. It does present a few issues, however. One that we've been talking about recently is a scenario where you have some machine generated code that can function by itself, but sometimes your user wants to extend it...

I've been tracking topics I wanted to cover in various methods (excel spreadsheets, Post-It (tm) notes, “post-it compatible” notes, writing on my hand, and graffiti in my office). It's been hard to keep all of those straight, so I'd like to centralize them in a blog post. If you have a question that you'd like me to answer, please add...

A customer wrote me today to ask, “Why can't I do arithmetic on byte types?” For example, if you write: byte a = 0x01;byte b = ~a; The compiler will complain on the second line that you can't convert an int to a byte. This happens because there are no operations defined for any types smaller than 4-byte types. The question is,...

CLR Design Choices

Just came across this:   Method Inlining There is a cost associated with method calls; arguments need to be pushed on the stack or stored in registers, the method prolog and epilog need to be executed and so on. The cost of these calls can be avoided for certain methods by simply moving the method body of the method being called into the body...

I got this question in email today, and I thought I'd share my response. For those of you who don't know, the 'inline' keyword in the C language was designed to control whether the compiler inlined a function into the calling function. For example, if I had something like int square(int x){    return x * x;} and used it here: int y...

Two more people: Grant Richins Dan Fernandez  

A new post on the MSDN dev center gives a great overview of the new features coming up in Whidbey (though there are a few language surprises that aren't in that doc that I hope to cover soon).  

dom (at least I think it's 'dom' - he's made a fair effort not to have his name anywhere on his blog page) asks for a language feature, and I respond  

Jim Griesmer

Brad Abrams talks about this new page on MSDN.