Troubleshooting multi-threaded applications has always been fun. And by fun I mean pulling your hair out kind of fun. The troubleshooting can be especially challenging when the bug involves threading errors. Errors such as race conditions and dead locks can be hard to track down. One useful thing that I've found is the Debug class in the System.Diagnostics namespace. The Write() method on the Debug class allows you to write debug output to either the output window in Visual Studio or a flat file....

One of my favorite new features on Vista is the instant search feature in the start menu. Just start typing in a program name or file name and Vista will find the program or file for you. You can then launch the program or open the file without having to navigate through the start menu or the file system. We still use XP at work and the instant search feature would be really cool to have on XP. Recently, a co-worker told me about this tool for XP called "Launchy", which basically does what the instant...

Here is something that you may not be aware of. In .NET, if you use regular expressions, your code would perform much better if you minimize the times when you instantiate a Regex object. For example, if you have a regular expression that you use repetitively throughout your code, you should construct the Regex object once and reuse it throughout your code. You'd be surprised how much overhead the Regex constructor requires. Additionally, you should always pre-compile your regular expressions as...