Last Friday, I worked a bit on the project templates, and then went home. Monday morning, I went on a bike ride, and then went to work. Somewhere in between, I stopped being a the pm responsible for the project system and community and started being the C# compiler PM. It all started this spring, when one of our PMs decided to leave Microsoft and...

I wrote this in response to a customer question today, and thought it might be interesting: ****** To update something on a form from another thread, you need to use Invoke() to get to the right thread. If I have a method that's called through an EventHandler delegate, it will look something like: public void ButtonClick(object sender, EventArgs...

I got a ton of comments on my post on the new project templates, and rather than try to answer them in the comments, I thought I 'd answer them here, so they're at least somewhat coherent to read. Oh, and thanks for all the comments. One more note: Some of the things that I did in the console app do not apply to all apps. For example, if you're...

One of the things I own for the C# team is the project system. For this, I'm what's known as a relationship PM, which means that I'm responsible for something but there's no C# team that does project system work. My job is to figure out what the C# user needs and drive them to the VS Core project team. There are lots of good things coming, most of...

One of the benefits of getting older is that you're less worried at looking foolish (though I'll probably hear about this from work tommorrow...) Somewhere around a quarter of a century ago, my mother handed me a book that she said I would enjoy, and she was right. Though I have read all of Jane Austen's books, Pride and Prejudice remains my...

We have a ski place in Skykomish, WA (20 miles from Stevens Pass) that my wife and I have been finishing for the past couple of years (contractor did the shell to painted drywall, we do everything else). Having music while doing this is a critical factor, so I brought an old stereo (my first receiver, in fact, from 1980) and a 5 disk CD changer up...

Wow, two programming/C# enties in a single day... Before I joined the C# team, I was the test lead for the C++ compiler for a number of years. We would periodically get customer comments that "the compiler was broken", and upon further investigation, we would usually find that it was a bug in the program. There was usually a good correlation...

I have a home music system that uses Evation's irman to provide remote control of song selection. That lets me listen upstairs and control the music with a simple remote control. I'm building a replacement to that system using C# (more on that in a few months), and I can't use the irman because then my main system wouldn't work. It was either...

This morning I left the cage at home, and decided to come to work using a two-wheeled vehicle. Since I'm only about 2 miles from campus, I took the long way round and rode along beautiful Lake Sammamish Blvd, into Redmond, and then up highway 520 towards Microsoft. I haven't been riding much the past year or so, and every time I do, I'm...

We are trying to set up newsgroups to discuss the CLI and C# standards. These groups would live in the comp hierararchy on USENET, and when you want to do that, you need to follow the accepted practices. We are now in the "call for votes" phase. It's considered a violation of ethics to encourage people to vote one way or the other, so please keep...

So, I'm working on a music playing application (to be revealed sometime around PDC, or perhaps a bit later if I don't get it working) to play around with Whidbey features. One of the things I want to do is be able to display the album art. So, I dust off the docs for WMP - which are a bit spotty in...

If you put wheat bread into a toaster and take out wheat toast, what happens when you put french bread in a toaster?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of having lunch with Bill Venners and Bruce Eckel. Bill runs Artima.com, a cool site with lots of interesting content. Bruce, of course, is the noted author of Thinking in C++ , and MindView.net. Bruce taught me C++, or at least his book "Using C++" helped a...

I mentioned a day or so ago that I have a motorcycle. A little clarification is in order. I started riding in 1986 when my 1969 Citroen Safari broke a timing chain at 70 MPH, and embedded a couple of valves in the pistons. It was either a cheap car or a decent motorcycle, and a Honda...

Yesteraday, I was struck by the fact that in a technological world, nomenclature outlasts the items it refers to. When I first joined Microsoft ("The year was 1994. The place was Redmond, Washington..."), we used MS Mail for email, and for scheduling, there was part of it named Schedule+...