Latest Microsoft Blogs

Kevin Frie, development lead for core parts of the CLR recently posted about what CLR updates that come in 3.5 SP1 ....   NGen infrastructure rewrite :  the new infrastructure uses less memory, produces less fragmented NGen images with much better locality, and does so in dramatically less time.  What this means to you:  Installing or servicing an NGen image is much faster, and cold startup time of your NGen’ed code is better. Framework Startup Performance Improvements :  The framework is now better optimized for startup.  Better OS citizenship :  We’ve modified NGen to produce images that are ASLR capable, in an effort to decrease potential security attack surface area.  Better 32-bit code...

VS2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 offer a ton of customer value from Linq to Ajax and much more.  The service pack we have been working on to round out this release adds even more new value in addition to fixing a 100s of customer reported bugs!  All of it is driven by customer asks and I am excited about how we have begun to embrace a model of providing great customer value on a very regular cadence.  Omar Khan and I recently recorded a DotNetRocks episode where we talked about all these great things.  I thought it would be fun to list just a few of my personal favorite new features in this SP...   What is your favorite one?    For Web Developers: - ASP.NET Dynamic Data makes building data driven web applications...

I just noticed that the good folks at Pixel8 posted a podcast I did with them a while back. It was a fun conversation about a bit of .NET history as well as where we are going. Landing Page Download show I'd love the hear what you think! Read More...

A while back I blogged about the .NET Framework 3.5 Namespace poster... We made a few tweaks and updated it, including making it available in more formats. Download Links: Full XPS Split XPS PDF Tiled PDF Enjoy! Read More...

I have been convinced for a while now that the industry is headed toward more of a companion application model... that is a model that offers the best of the web world in the browser and everywhere and the best of the client world out of browser. One common example of this model is Outlook Web Access everywhere and Outlook for the desktop . While this patterns has been around for a while... it has been very difficult to implement. Today, if you can afford to double implement this is in reach, but as we move forward with .NET and Xaml everywhere with Silverlight and full WPF you can reuse lots more of your application design (in Xaml) and business logic (in .NET) across the web and the desktop. As I am sure you are aware, NBC , like all the major...

Many of you have asked for an update to the .NET Framework namespace poster for 3.5... Thanks to Paul Andrew , Kit George and many others, we now have it! See Paul's blog for more details... Download the full PDF to a color printer near you ;-) Read More...

By default .NET applications (EXEs) that are launched from a remote file system (eg \\server\bin\SomeApp.exe ), will not be considered trusted and typically will fail (unless specifically designed to run with low trust). This is in direct contrast with unmanaged applications which always give full trust to launched programs, regardless of location. From a quick search , I know many of you have run into this issue and have found some work arounds . The .NET runtime team is considering changing this behavior so that managed applications act just like unmanaged one in this respect. We believe that it will not decrease security, but there is risk and effort required for any change and would like feedback on its likely usefulness to customers. A...

Rico is doing some very interesting work to get some sort of idea about the allocation overhead of using different parts of the .NET Framework. As he says, this is a fairly rough approximation done just with static analysis, but it does give you something to chew on. Rico starts by focusing on making a good hashcode function… I thought I'd look at properties. As you know the Framework Design Guidelines encourages you to make simple properties that are logically just fields . There is a reasonable assumption that the get accessor of a property would not have to allocate any data. The good news is the vast majority of these had 0 or 1 allocation. The thing to watch out for is that some of the worst offenders are properties, with 15 with a score...

Patrick , one of the founding members of the CLR team, starts a blog by posting a brief bit about this history of the CLR. I dug up a few other bits of CLR history… Enjoy! History Of Csharp Brian Harry on the CLR My DotNet Rocks! show posted Resource management Read More...

I recently had a fun time baking cookies with my three year old son.. He had a great time scooping out the floor, dumping in the sugar and plopping in the butter... but when they came out of oven and I took my first bite, I know something we dreadfully wrong, they tasted terrible! Just then my wife came in with a helpful observation: “Well, did you measure?” This time my lack of measuring only cost me a plate of cookies... If you are building a business critical app with a perf problem, the stakes are a bit higher. While we are certainly striving for a Pit of Success kind of platform, you can expect to get world class performance for your applications without measuring. Blindly optimizing bits of code across the product is more likely to introduce...