Duncan Mackenzie.NET

Hey folks, I've been working with the C# Team and two great C# MVPs (Jon Skeet and Nicholas Paldino) to put together a 'live' C# FAQ. This FAQ is being run as a blog, hosted at http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq and is displayed on the C# Developer Center on MSDN (at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/t […]

Visit his blog and offer some feedback if you want to influence his presentation... […]

I've been thinking a bit about Generics lately, with the growing conclusion that I will mostly use the ones that ship in the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework, but wrapping my head around a few situations where I could see myself defining Generic classes of my own. With all of these Generics […]

Someone suggested to me that VB.NET Whidbey didn't have support for 'Generic Methods', so I quickly wrote a bit of sample code to check (yes, it does support Generic Methods) and I thought I'd post that test code for your amusement. […]

One of the changes from VB6 to VB.NET was the removal of non-zero lower bounded arrays... a concept discussed by Eric Gunnerson recently, and now covered by Paul... giving it a bit of VB perspective. Non-zero lower bounded arrays (the other side of the coin) ... To finesse this issue, the CLR desig […]

Chris just got back from Disney, Sea World, etc... Brian heads there (Disneyworld in his case) this weekend, the site manager for C#, Amy, is going to Disneyland this weekend.... […]

Hmm... pretty cool so far, guess I'll see when I decide to start moving music around to my MCE box, my laptop, my Rio device... etc... found the Cake song I wanted though :) […]

You may never see the actual web interface to my blog, but if you do you'll see two new graphics along the left-hand side... […]

If you follow Eric's blog (and if you are into C#, you should) then you'll have already seen these... but if you haven't then let these three posts be just a taste of what is available over there; Who does Microsoft talk to when they have questions? ... The feedback we got around E&C has been fair […]

Over in the Office side of the world, a set of 6 labs have been released, focused on learning how to use VB.NET and C# to create Office solutions with Office 2003 and Visual Studio Tools for Office... cool stuff if Office development is your thing (and it certainly is mine)... Visual Studio Tools […]

CodeSmith 2.5 is available, and although I've mentioned it in a few articles on MSDN already, I have to tell you again... I use this utility all the time. […]

From Dave Wanta, the guy behind kbalertz.com, a detailed FAQ for the SMTP mail classes in the .NET Framework. If you are using System.Web.Mail, then you'll want to check it out: http://www.systemwebmail.net/ […]

I'm just playing around with an internal application, just a tool that hits our internal web services for article ratings (you know, the little box that says "7 out of 9" next to MSDN articles...) and displays the results in a grid. Well, there are a lot of things I've been hoping to add to the […]

Shaykat, a PM on the C# Team, has been posting some great tips on VS.NET 2003 so I thought I would collect them here for your linking pleasure; Tip #1: Stop the solution explorer flashiness when opening a project! Tip #2: Macros Tip #3: View exception information with $exception Tip #4: Demo be […]

A few team members have blogged about this already, but here I go again... Unit testing is a method of testing individual software components. Each function in every class is tested to make sure it does its job correctly, with the hope that if everything works correctly by itself, higher level prob […]

Ok... so I'm biased here, Pedro used to be my grand-boss at MSDN, and now works on some very cool and very graphical magic as part of the Whitehorse team... but on the side it appears he has been developing some Windows Forms controls, so I would suggest you check them out; This ControlLibrary con […]

Turns out we (MSDN) are looking for a few good testers to come and work with us in Redmond... if you are interested in a position, and the following job description (which you may have also seen on Laura or Kent's blog...) is appealing, let us know via this link. Are you ready to join an exciting t […]

This page lists all of the C# team blogs (that I am aware of) and provides you with a list of featured posts that I've pulled out of the various individual blogs ... check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/team/blogs and let me know what you think. […]

Check it out here In this fifth installment of the article series we're going to examine graphs. Graphs are composed of a set of nodes and edges, just like trees, but with graphs there are no rules for the connections between nodes. With graphs, there is no concept of a root node, nor is there a co […]

Well, if you haven't managed to see any of them live yet... don't fret, they are all available on-demand as well (after the live presentation that is). If you are a VB6 programmer interested in learning .NET or if you are already programming in VB.NET, you have to check them out... Session 1: Prog […]

Min Kwan Park, who works in QA on the C# team (responsible for debugger features) has compiled an amazing document for troubleshooting debugging issues in Visual Studio 2002 and 2003 ... check it out here […]

Anson, a PM on the IDE team of C#, discusses the different ways that Intellisense is used and the design decisions that need to be made to keep it useful for developers. One of the features that we continually get positive comments on is IntelliSense. More specifically, virtually every user that w […]

Gus Perez has been maintaining an up-to-date list of C# team blogs, but after carefully duplicating his categorization in SharpReader, I thought I would try putting it up as an OPML file... You can grab it from here, and import it into your RSS Aggregator of choice... enjoy (oh, and I ran into the […]

Gus Perez has posted the binary and source for a little utlity he has dubbed "ezClip"; Back in the 7.0 days I wrote a little tool called ezClip. It's sole purpose was to allow me to copy/paste files from one command prompt window to another. Our test tree can get pretty deep directory-wise and hav […]

Matt provides us with some insights into the world of language design, a field that most of us have only dabbled in via a university course, with his discussion of keywords, operators and the problems with extending an existing programming language after its original release. It amazes me how […]

Brian Randell has written 4 (really 7, but 3 of them are just the same article as both VB and C#) articles on using MSDE in your applications... (via Kent Sharkey's blog); Using MSDE? A whole whack of articles from Brian Randell on working with MSDE in your Web applications […]

Scott goes into detail on the cool "Visualizers" feature of the Whidbey debugger in his post "visualizers for PDC Whidbey"; Visualizers are custom viewers meant to be used at debug-time. They are entirely managed, and associated with particular types. Where before DataSet was a horrible mess in the […]

Grant starts on what appears to be a series of posts about a new C# language feature, with "Anonymous Methods, Part 1 of ?" So what are anonymous methods? It is a way of writing an unnamed nested method that, just like most languages that have nested methods, allows access to all of the outer metho […]

Gregg discusses "Why interop debugging is difficult"... The Visual Studio debugger supports debugging both .NET code and native code at the same time. We call this ‘interop’. At first glance, this might not seem like much of an accomplishment. After all, we support debugging .NET code we […]

Click here to see the first post, which is a request for some questions!!

Someone recently asked me for our template, style guidelines and other details about writing for MSDN. I wanted to find the public page about this, so I dug around for what seemed like ages and couldn't find anything even though I knew this was up on MSDN somewhere. […]

Hey folks.... I've been thinking (dangerous, I know) and I've decided that you need to see more code. This might mean more code in this blog, more on the site, more pointed to that lives on other sites.... […]

In a recent post to his blog, Paul Vick discusses the new IsNot Operator (and the history/rational behind the Is operator), which allows you to write;