Over this past week at PDC I was lucky enough to see some fantastic sessions and spend time with members of the F# and greater Visual Studio language teams.  Naturally, these experiences have left me both floored and swimming in new ideas.  This edition of Discoveries This Week includes both the very best of what I saw at PDC 2009 and ...

I’ve recently been building an ActiveX Control in .NET 2.0 and thought I would share some of the problems I’ve run into, as well as their solutions.  I hope that in reading this you can avoid a few of the timesinks I fell into.    Safe for Scripting By default, ActiveX controls are not marked as safe for scripting.  ...

While in most cases there is no explicit information in an assembly as to which languages it was compiled from, it is possible to make an educated guess as to which languages were used.  This is due to the fact that each different .NET compiler leaves it’s own unique type of fingerprint.  In this article I discuss both my methodology for ...

This is the first in a series of posts on the topic of interaction between different .NET languages.  I will cover all of the major Microsoft languages: C#, Visual Basic, F# and C++/CLI. In this first post in the series I will build a four language project in Visual Studio 2008 and begin to explore inter-language inheritance.  One of ...

It has come to my attention via a recent DZone article that .NET 3.5 and 2.0 SP1 jointly included a new feature which lets you manipulate the way your garbage collector acts programmatically.  This can be done through changing the value of a new property of the System.Runtime.GCSettings class named LatencyMode. In this article I will walk you ...

Tuning the garbage collector to the specific context of the particular application can significantly improve the performance of both non-threaded and multi-threaded applications. In this post I discuss the gcConcurrent and gcServer settings which allow you to exercise some control how the Garbage Collector operates.   Articles in This ...

I have a new CodeProject article up which details how to make a Debugger Visualizer in the case where you need to custom serialize the object. The actual classes I build in the tutorial are only useful with our DotImage project line. However, the process of creating a Custom Serializer should be useful to any .NET ...

This is the first in a series of posts I will be writing about managing memory in .NET. Before I move on to more complex techniques, I thought it would be good to cover the basics. Articles in This Series Part 1 - Basic Housekeeping Part 2 - Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation Part 3 - Increasing the Size of the ...

There are a great number of different ways to count the number of processors available to the .NET developer. In this post I will go over some of the more common methods and their pros and cons.   The Envirionment.ProcessorCount Way Code: Environment.ProcessorCount;  Supported Platforms: Windows 98 Or Greater, .NET 2.0 or ...