I've been cleaning my office today, and I need some help on a problem I have. Back when I wrote my C# book (A Programmer's Introduction to C# (still available at better booksellers everywhere (Eric needs to pay for his season's pass at Stevens Pass (where it snowed this week (view the webcam))))), I was lucky enough to have the first edition...

I have a design question for you. Yes, I don't own the project system anymore, but I started this particular issue, and I want to follow up on it: In VS 2002, whenever you double-click on a form file in solution explorer, the project system always opens the form designer on that file. We are considering modifying the behavior in Whidbey so that...

(The opinions expressed herein reflect my opinion about the principles we used in designing C#, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the C# design team). Know what you're trying to build Over the past few years, I've answered a lot of questions about language design rationale. Most questions have straightforward answers. For example, if...

Last week, I made a bad joke (I'm the owner of bad jokes for the Visual C# PM team), related to the the concept of arity in generics. I regret that I don't remember the exact joke I made, but we riffed a bit on different permutations (popul-arity, singul-arity, disp-arity). That went on for a few minutes, but we realized that it ws a tough joke to...

Roy Osherove writes of some very interesting research in his blog. I've always found research about how we read to be fascinating

My latest column is live on MSDN. This one shows the socket-based peer-to-peer system that I built for my ongoing music scheduling project. As you may or may not know, there is no support for serialization on the compact framework, so I had to build my own. It ended being pretty cool. In other news, last week one of my previous column made the...

Delegates, Components, and Simplexity

Over the past few years, we've gotten lots of suggestions and questions about the C# language, and we haven't done a very good job responding to them, for a variety of reasons.   The first reason is that we haven't devoted as much time as we probably should have to interacting with customers on the subject of language design. That's...

Today, I participated in the Tacoma Wheelmen's Heritage Century, a ride through the picturesque Enumclaw valley. Normally, I would have added "in the shadow of Mt. Rainier", but since it was overcast, the mountain was hidden. I had hoped to do the whole century (100 miles), but because I got sick a couple of times this summer and injured recently,...

Today I set a new record in the amount of time I spent on a single email. I've been trying to coordinate a change in how generics work. Ultimately, this will involve coordinating with about 10 teams to figure out how to make a breaking change without breaking the build (which is a pretty big in in the VS team), but for now, I'm just working to get...

My daughter just started a new science unit in her 4th grade class. After she explained it at dinner tonight, I told her a story that I thought I'd share with you. One day, a farmer got up, got dressed and went outside to the barn. He got out his tractor and took it out to his alfalfa field, which he needed to plow under after harvest. He spent...

In VS2003, since we don't have generics, we have lots of strongly-typed collections. For example, there's the LinkCollection class, which holds objects of type Link. Now that we have generics, we could replace such collections with: List<Link> (well, actually, we couldn't replace them, as that would break existing code, but we could do that...

Eric Sink presents an insightful analysis

I've been diving into generics a bit more deeply, and I'd like to share some of the new terminology that will be floating around. Open Type An open type is a generic type that you've defined. List<T> is a good example. It's called "open" because it's not fully defined without knowing what T is, and therefore you can never have an instance of...

Yesterday, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report was released. In 248 pages, it covers both the accident and the causes of the accident in detail, and presents a fascinating bit of forensic science. The investigation that that board and NASA did into the accident is top-notch. Unfortunately, it appears that NASA didn't learn from Challenger,...