http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/

Holiday lights. The first house that my wife and I bought was in a development with an active homeowner's association. The first year, we got a flier from the association that said: Holiday decoration contest $100 first prize $50 second prize $25 third prize With hundreds of houses in the development, we didn't figure we had any chance, but we did...

Like many people, I was saddened when I heard about Douglas Adams' death last May. Of course, I had read Hitchhikers many years ago, and had also read his Dirk Gently series. I also had the unique (well, not *truly* unique) privilege of hearing him speak when he did a talk at Microsoft a few years ago. I recently came across a copy of The...

From Jan Gray's blog (Jan is another of the Perp team members), a new release of the CLR Profiler. This tool, which used to be known as the "Allocation Profiler", was written by Peter Sollich, who also happened to be a member of the C# design team for a while.  

A few weeks ago, Anders walked into the C# design meeting and said, "I think I have a way to get generic algorithms to work with our current support", and then proceeded to outline a scheme on the whiteboard. I dutifully copied it into our design notes (after being away from the design process for a couple of years, keeping the notes up to date is...

If you're concerned about performance, you should read Rico Mariani's blog. Rico is an architect on the CLR team, and, coincidentally, is one of the developers who interviewed me way back in 1994.  

 If you search on MSDN, you won't find any general C# coding guidelines. When people have asked how they should write their code, they often get pointed to the class library design guidelines. There is lots of good advice there, but not all of it applies universally. One of the guidelines says: Do not use instance fields that are...

Note to my younger self: Eat better. There won't be any programming content here, so you may choose to ignore this post, though you may regret it in a decade or two. Don't say I didn't warn you. A few weeks before PDC, I started have a problem of a very personal nature. That's right, I had an outbreak (incident? flare up? episode?) of hemorrhoids...

An Introduction to C# Generics By one of my friends, Juval Lowy, founder of IDesign.    

The C# team is hosting a chat on MSDN next week discussing the changes in Visual C#, including both language changes and IDE changes. November 20, 2:00 P.M. Pacific time/5:00 P.M. Eastern time - You can find more information about this chat on http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/.

I recently built a music system for the ski cabin (you can only listen to Infinity so many times). It's a Micro-ATX system with a 40Gig drive, a CD ROM, and 256M of memory. More than enough for music. It runs the same custom MFC application that I use for my music system at home, and I'm using an old PocketPC as the remote control. The system...

I'm sitting in a large conference room watching my manager, Scott Wiltamuth, do a presentation about the new features in the C# IDE. The highlights are: Expansions, which are user-written "code templates" which are triggered through the standard CTRL-Space syntax. They are somewhat like a Cut/Paste, except that you can define fields in the text...

I spent a bit of time in the session on the new C++ language syntax, and I saw a similar presentation a few weeks ago back in Redmond. The current release of VC++ uses an extension syntax to "add on" the managed (ie clr) concepts onto the existing C++ syntax. For Whidbey, the C++ team has ingrained the managed concepts deeply into the language...

Well, I'm here PDC (and OOPSLA, which also runs this week) had a run-in with mother nature, and mother nature is ahead. Fires in California shut down the LA regional FAA office. FAA Regional offices control large amounts of airspace around a region, handling all flights once they've left the airspace local to the airport. This meant that nothing...

All the C# team members will be wearing "C# Team Member" buttons, often with very nice black C# polor shirts. We also have buttons for you, if you wish to identify yourself as a C# programmer.