Showing category results for Premier Developer

In my last post, I detailed the differences among read/write, read only, frozen and immutable collection types.  I described how immutable collections come with a hit to the garbage collector due to the garbage they generate during mutations.  I have a very positive update on that topic. My previous implementation for the immutable col...

[Update: a more recent post with new data on attainable performance of immutable collections] The topics of immutability and functional programming has fascinated me lately.  Mostly because of my work on the Visual Studio Common Project System (CPS) which is a large, highly multi-threaded code base that only remains sane because of its reli...

Visual C++ 2010 includes a debugger extensibility point that makes it easy for people who have written their own debuggers, or wish to modify the way existing debuggers are launched, to do so.Check out the Visual C++ Debugger Launch Extension project template on the Visual Studio Gallery to get started.

User Account Control, the feature in Vista that causes installers and some applications to require "elevation" to administrator privileges to run, cuts both ways.  It's designed to protect users from apps that try to make system-level changes by giving the user the heads up that it's about to happen and gives the user the chance to a...

The GZip encoder is not included in NetCF as it is on the desktop WCF, but it isn't hard to build yourself and in fact we have released a sample of exactly how to add your own GZip encoder to NetCF: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108652 So many people have asked me for it lately I thought I'd better just post the link.  Have fun!

Some humorous pros and cons to Visual Studio, if the Microsoft Office team were ever to take over. (disclaimer: this is a tongue in cheek post.  No offense -- only laughs intended)

You know that Find text box in the toolbar of Visual Studio?  Those of us who are keyboard-inclined probably never use it because Ctrl+F is quicker than moving your hand to the mouse.  But there is a hidden gem of a feature inside it that really makes me feel like a power user that I wanted to share. That find box doubles as a Command Wi...

If you are a web developer I hope you've considered accepting OpenID credentials for logging in your users.  If you have an ASP.NET web site, the process of adding OpenID support to your web site couldn't be easier when you use the free C# DotNetOpenId library.  Supporting OpenID is a great idea:

In C++, TCHAR, LPCTSTR, CString, and other types discretely change to their char/WCHAR, CStringA/CStringW counterparts depending on whether UNICODE is defined in your source code.  Cool.  By conscientiously using _countof(x) instead of sizeof(x) where appropriate and TCHAR's everywhere instead of char/WCHAR, you can write code that will c...

Writing Visual Studio add-ins gives you the power to do some impressive things within the IDE to enhance your productivity.  Unfortunately getting your add-in to load into Visual Studio can sometimes be a pain.  Here's just a tip you should know about the .AddIn file that Visual Studio generates for you. The path you provide to the add...