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Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

26 Jun

1/ If you have ever worked with Windows Forms, you may have noticed that the icon that appears in solution explorer changes when it contains a 'designable' type, and that when you double-click on any file with that icon, it opens the designer.

2/ If you play around with this a bit, you may also notice that if you change a class to descend from System.Windows.Forms.Form, it will become designable, and the designer lights up. I doubt many people have thought about how that works.

3/ However, given the behavior, we can tell that somehow the project system must be able to detect when a class becomes designable… and how does it even know what it means to be designable anyway?

Read 13 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

24 Jun

1/ In the VS 2005 release there were many new features for the C# IDE experience, several of which would generate code. An example was implement interface, which was proffered as either a 'smart tag' or through the context menu.

2/ Another was generate method stub, where we would optionally create a method if you consumed it without having declared it first. When we released VS 2005, these features would generate stubs of the following form (this is the code gen for implementing IComparable<Widget>):

3/ public int CompareTo(Widget other)
{
throw new Exception("The method or operation is not implemented.");
}

The C# community was, not surprisingly, somewhat confused (and often livid) that the code generation didn't use NotImplementedException instead.

Read 11 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

23 Jun

@DesignPuddle

1/ @DesignPuddle asked why Solution Explorer search is so much slower than Goto All when searching for files. This is seemingly nonsensical because Goto All is presumably searching for everything while solution explorer search is searching less, right? Well… it is nonsensical,

2/ the search should be much faster, and the reason it’s slow has a lot to do with how it was initially designed versus what it’s now being used for. So, lets dig in a bit.

Both Goto All and Search in Solution Explorer are extensible via providers. However, the providers are

3/ different, and that’s critical to understand the difference. Search in Solution Explorer was added in VS 2012 as I recall. It works by kicking off an asynchronous task that invokes each provider. It currently does this sequentially instead of in parallel. There are really two

Read 26 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

14 Jun

1/ It's been very busy at MS ever since the new year started, and you've probably seen a bit of what we're working on with Visual Studio 2022 (devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/v…).

2/ I'm going to go further back in history though, and talk about a defining moment for Visual Studio .NET (2002) and really all of Microsoft. In early 2002, Bill Gates sent a memo to the entire company that kicked off the Trustworthy Computing initiative.

3/ There had recently been a raft of serious computer viruses, coupled with the September 11th terrorist attacks; it was a turning point for the country, industry, and company.

Read 18 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

4 Jan

One of the stories that my first manager used to tell, that I always got a kick out of was the following. Context: Think Week was a week that Bill Gates used to take every year to learn about a huge variety of topics, and folks at MS would submit papers/bits. It was a big deal.

"I joined Microsoft on 3/19/99 and found out I was working on a new language. The first week was a blur just getting up to speed and I don't think I even installed the complier (not that it did much then - I think you could define an interface but not use it yet).

In my second week (3/27/99) I get an email from Drew saying that Bill [Gates] wants the C# Language spec and the latest build of the compiler by 4.30 (Note that it was 4.30 not 4/30). I'm still getting used to US dates so I see 4.30 and think it's 4:30pm that day.

Read 8 tweets

Anson Horton

@AnsonHorton

3 Jan

Incremental rebuild was a feature of the C# compiler which was meant to increase the throughput after an initial build. It worked on the principle that changes in between builds are localized, and that the information gathered by the compiler from previous builds wouldn't be

entirely invalidated; specifically, some of the information and, indeed, the assembly itself could be updated in an incremental fashion resulting in faster builds.

Both the VS 2002 and VS 2003 compilers exposed this option through the /incr switch on the command line, and the ‘Incremental Rebuild’ option in the Advanced tab of Project Properties. In 2002 incremental rebuild was enabled by default for all project types.

Read 22 tweets

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