Blogs|Oct 23, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 Concurrency Visualizer Profiling In Depth First Look

One of the most important technologies used at Microsoft is Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), especially inside Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. There’s a small problem with ETW. It’s beyond wonderful for the Windows team at Microsoft, but for just about everyone else, it’s not so hot. Don’t get me wrong, ETW is an…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 20, 2009

A Weak Post

The WeakReference is one of those fun interview topics. Some people have never heard of it and when they learn about it will say, “That’s a textbook question … why would I ever use a Weak Reference?” A weak reference references an object while still allowing that object to be reclaimed by garbage collection. Why…
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Blogs|Oct 19, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 Concurrency Resource Profiling In Depth First Look

Nearly everyone reading this is using a machine with multiple cores. With a basic laptop containing a dual core CPU and your average desktop with a four core CPU, we have processing power our computing ancestors could only dream about. Most of us developers are writing multithreaded applications to take advantage of that power, but…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 19, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 Sampling and Instrumentation Profiling In Depth First Look

While some teams solve their performance problems by throwing bigger hardware at the problem, many of us really do care about creating fast code. Visual Studio 2008 Team Developer Edition and above has had a great profiler that I’ve used to solve many performance problems but Visual 2010 moves it into the realm of excellent…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 19, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 Code Analysis In-Depth First Look

Code Analysis is one of those great tools that people don’t run nearly enough. I have screamed repeatedly, “Never do anything at run time you can do at compile time.” The best time to catch the Design Guidelines, security, and performance violations is at build time. Code Analysis and its standalone twin, FxCop, have been…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 19, 2009

VS 2010 Beta 2 IntelliTrace In-Depth First Look

After getting a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, I was dying to see the amazing IntelliTrace feature. You know IntelliTrace as Historical Debugging, but consider HD as the code name. No matter what the marketing people call it, IntelliTrace is the single most important feature in the Visual Studio 2010 release. The…
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missing-export|Oct 19, 2009

My VS 2010 Beta 2 Install Experience

While I was hoping that VS 2010 would just install itself as soon as I downloaded the bits, they haven’t quite gotten that feature working just yet. I guess the team had to leave themselves something to do in the next version. I grabbed the new Ultimate edition as that replaces the Team Suite. The…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 16, 2009

Silverlight Behaviors and Triggers: Making a True Behavior

We have explored using dependency properties and attached properties to abstract behaviors and triggers. In my last article, TextBox Magic, I showed how to create a dependency property to enable a textbox filter that would prevent anything but digits. In this article, we’ll take it a step further and turn it into a “true” behavior.…
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Blogs|Oct 14, 2009

Silverlight 3’s New Client Networking Stack

One of the most useful yet little-known new features of Silverlight 3 is one that has nothing to do with UIs: a brand new networking stack called the client HTTP stack, the client networking stack, or simply the client stack. Silverlight 2 introduced rich networking to Silverlight. With classes such as WebClient and HttpWebRequest, you could…
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Blogs|Oct 12, 2009

Using .NET 4.0 Tasks with the AsyncEnumerator

I’ve been doing a lot of work with the new Task class that ships with .NET 4.0 as I’ve been revising my CLR via C# book (due out in early 2010). Task are really good for performing asynchronous compute-bound work and while my AsyncEnumerator was really designed for performing I/O-bound work using the CLR’s APM,…
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