C#

Latest and Greatest Watch Window

Yow-Hann Lee — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:49:45 GMT

You know the little watch window that you get in Visual Studio...well, in the scope of the software development world, this is what is currently in my watch window:

Microsoft Project Codename "Velocity" - Distributed In-Memory Application Cache Platform

This one is huge for .NET. All things considered, it is arriving late to the party (Reference memcached and jcs) but it is worth watching how it all plays out. I am looking forward to trying out the optimistic/pessimistic concurrency models and other cache configurations. So while like the rest of the folks who are excited about Silverlight 2 Beta 2 this week, it is Velocity that is going in the watch window.

As a side note, this now also means there is another answer to BrainSharpener #10. Depending on the scenario, that could either be a good or bad thing :)

Quick BrainSharpener (#11)

Yow-Hann Lee — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:24:09 GMT

Haven't been contributing to this series in a while, so here's a standard one to ease back into the flow...

Given any two large List<int>, what is the quickest way to find the mutual intersection of the two? Now take into consideration memory constraints?

MSDN Community Content Disappearing? It's all in the Version #s

Yow-Hann Lee — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:07:17 GMT

I blogged about MSDN Community Content last year. A month ago, they celebrated their first anniversary. Recently, I logged in and was ready to add content only to find some quirks:

On an initial glance, it would appear that previous posts had disappeared.
Discrepancies in the URLs between the user's page and the rss feed. (i.e. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.specialized.listdictionary(VS.85).aspx vs. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.specialized.listdictionary.aspx). This meant that community content in the former URL didn't show up in the latter and vice versa.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/*(VS.71).aspx doesn't accept community content.

From #1 and 2, it seemed like MSDN community wiki was experiencing some issues with content migration. A quick search through Microsoft Forums confirmed this to be the case. Based on the thread, it appears the community team is working on ironing out their migration story though they didn't describe how.

One particular strategy to take would be to allow users to select which offerings (VS.85, VS.80, etc) to percolate to. However, the ideal flow would be to have the MSDN Community Content display all content regardless of the URL version. The UX would be a lot smoother and save users from having to sift through each version/URL to find community content. Additionally, if the community content only applies to a particular version of .NET, the content contributor should call that out. And if that is missing, readers can either check the date on the comment or another contributor can come in and add, "this is a 2.0 issue and has been fixed in 3.0" OR "this class is obsolete, please use X to conform to best practices". Ah, that is the beauty and very purpose of wikis! It handles content history/versioning and empowers the users to drive up content quality and conciseness.

So if you're interested in adding community content, be weary of which entry point you take (i.e. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureinfo(VS.85).aspx vs. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureinfo.aspx (currently VS.90)). Unfortunately, if they're issues pertaining .NET 1.1 or a BCL issue inherited over the different iterations, note that you won't be able to add content in the VS.71 pages.

Video of the Day:

The Lone Server from Windows Server Division Weblog

MVC Framework in ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP - Workaround for Accessing Controls in Code-Behind

Yow-Hann Lee — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:26:11 GMT

I've been meaning to post the following but only got to it just now. For those that have started playing around with the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP, you will have no doubt come across being unable to access controls declared in aspx from code behind. This is a heads up for those wanting to start dabbling in the MVC framework.

When you create a new ASP.NET MVC web project, the pages don't have a designer.cs file. In a typical web project, this is still dandy since you can access the controls by ID in code behind; the designer files are simply abstracted. However, in the MVC web project, you will get compilation errors. Instead, you could access inline. ASP.NET runtime will generate your declared controls (peek in temp dirs of your loaded modules), which explains why you can access and manipulate the controls inline.

Naturally, you may not want to do this inline. To access your controls in code behind, simply right-click on your web project and select "Convert to Web Application". And Voila!

Courtesy of ScottGu

Microsoft Parallel Extensions CTP, aka Parallel FX

Yow-Hann Lee — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:00:39 GMT

As if there weren't already enough new technologies to play around with recently, here comes another that I mentioned previously.

The hub for Parallel Computing is at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx. And you can download the Parallel Extensions CTP at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e848dc1d-5be3-4941-8705-024bc7f180ba&DisplayLang=en.

Late Nov and Dec has been a developer's dream, so many toys to play with in such a short timespan!

Microsoft Volta

Yow-Hann Lee — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:47:23 GMT

I came across the Public Sector Developer Weblog today to find something with bold claims.

From Microsoft Live Labs, it is the Microsoft Volta CTP. According to the blog post,

"The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together"

The promise of easy "architecture refactoring". It almost sounds too good to be true. Script#, Astoria, etc...all concepts rolled together? Although, on initial glance of the samples, it looks to generate a lot of excess noise that is not necessary. Obviously, if you're looking for highly optimized client-side code, this is probably not something that would be used. Nevertheless, it is quite intriguing and at the very least make a cool prototyping or demo environment. You can find it at: http://labs.live.com/volta/

This is definitely on my todo list of technologies to check out. Stay tuned...

Learning a Language...

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 08:22:59 GMT

No, it's not what you've come to expect in a GWB tech blog. No, this blog post is not about Scott Hanselman's debate of "a universally best programming language". I have recently been checking out http://www.visualstudiotalkshow.com. As you will no doubt notice, it is a French .NET podcast.

Other than a stint in Quebec early in my childhood and a couple French classes in high school, I am not exaclty a Francophone. However, by listening to this series, I am hoping to combine my passion of software development with learning a language. It's a struggle but should prove for a great time. Afterall, French is the language of love!

Although to heed the advice of Steve Yegge and his point of the "one trick pony", it should really be a French podcast on Python. Stay tuned...

Daylight Savings Time (end date) on server environments

Yow-Hann Lee — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 22:33:44 GMT

Since I didn't get a chance to blog about this back during the start date in Spring, I thought I would mark this end date instead. So by today, you will have your time rolled up an hour. Are your servers aware of that the time has changed? :)

They should according to February 2007 windows update. For those who may have somehow missed these the first time around, there is a Microsoft Daylight Savings Time Help and Support site at: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst.

Application Developers who missed these the first time around for the most part need not be in panic mode as most rely on the operating system updates. Those that outliers will have had checked out: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb264729.aspx.

As a mini extension to this, you may have noticed that your event log messages are rolled back an hour. So if you previously saw the messages before Nov 4 as 6PM, they will now show at 5PM. So if you have logs that go both to an event log and a file log, you'll see that they don't match up time wise despite having identical messages. Ideally, it would have been nice for the server to maintain the consistency of the event log message timestamps.

Looking forward to Task Parallel Library, aka Parallel FX Library...

Yow-Hann Lee — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 15:56:13 GMT

It's interesting to see the projects coming out of MSR. For example, back in 2005, MSR developed a C# Software Transactional Memory at: http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/6cfc842d-1c16-4739-afaf-edb35f544384/Details.aspx. The goal of the library was for devs to develop multithreaded programs with shared resources without using locks.

In the October issue of MSDN Magazine, we're presented a brief look into Microsoft's Parallel FX Library. Article can be found at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/futures/default.aspx. In an age of multi-core processors, the software infrastructure has yet to catch up. One measure of a great API is by contrasting the amount of pain suffered by implementing with and without that resource. I'm looking forward to the CTP. This and ScottGu's recent announcement of ASP.NET MVC framework.

Installing ReSharper Removes 'Track Active Item' in Visual Studio

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 06:56:07 GMT

For whatever reason, when you install JetBrains ReSharper in Visual Studio 2005, it loses your 'Track Active Item in Solution Explorer' setting. I'm not sure if this is done intentionally on JetBrains part. While you get the nice feature of hitting ctrl-N or ctrl-shift-N to go directly to your Type or class file, it'd be great to retain the Solution Explorer option by default. Discoverability is greatly enhanced with both of these in place.

So for those who love ReSharper but have been annoyed at it losing 'Track Active Item in Solution Explorer', you can reset this option in your Visual Studio Options.