dstelow notes…

Channel 9 has asked Erik Meijer to do a ground-up introduction to functional programming, because he and other MS programmers have spoken so much about its influence on the design of Visual Basic .NET and C#.

Expat is a library, written in C, for parsing XML documents. It's the underlying XML parser for the open source Mozilla project, perl's XML::Parser, and other open-source XML parsers. As demonstrated in my benchmark article, it's very fast. It also sets a high standard for reliability, robustness and correctness.

Undefined is not null, except that it is.
…but the shortest way to deal with this, and also the one that best expresses your intention of checking if an object is safe to use is probably to just rely on the type-sloppiness of JavaScript and count on it to evaluate null and undefined as false in a boolean expression, like this…

I covered earlier the WCF and WF PDC talks that the team is doing, but there are many other groups coming to PDC to talk about web services. Here is a sample of ten of those other talks that I think WCF developers may find interesting.

Thanks! We plan to release the .pst specification to the general public in the first half of 2010.

If you start to become really dependant on the Immediate window for your debugging, you should consider enabling the option to Redirect all Output window text to the Immediate window. This option can be enabled under Tools->Options->Debugging. Although the option says it redirects all Output window text, it will actually only redirect the debug messages (e.g. Debug.Print).

College student Windows offer.

I'm looking for an elegant approach to checking the value of neighbours of a cell, horizontally, vertically and diagonally. For instance, the neighbours of [0][2] are [0][1], [1][1] and [1][2] or the numbers 2, 5, 6.

an article for MSDN Magazine that appears in this month’s issue. Check out CLR Inside Out: Building Tuple which introduces the new Tuple type as well as discusses the design work we did behind it.

This series of posts are not really in-line with my normal debugging posts, but I just created a simple Traffic Jam game in Silverlight and thought I’d make it into a “lab series” that you can go through if you are getting started with Silverlight.
The game is called Seattle Streets and it based on the popular board game Rush Hour® where you help a little red car move to the Exit square by moving the other cars out of its way in as few moves as possible.
The project for the finished game is attached to this post…

Patrick Carnahan, a developer on Team Build, put together the following guide to the basic, as well as a few advanced, features of Team Build in TFS 2008. It's a great way to get started with continuous integration and other features in TFS 2008.

We have done substantial research at Trolltech into improving the Qt development experience. In this article, I want to share some of our findings and present the principles we've been using when designing Qt 4, and show you how to apply them to your code.

Nice series of posts on creating ria services app…This series on updating my Mix09 talk to current bits has sort of taken on a life of its own and I am not quite through, but I have had numerous requests for a directory of these posts so folks can quickly find what they are looking for.

A solution I’ve been using a lot lately is by taking advantage of jQuery itself. We can search for Ids directly from JavaScript since there’s a pretty simple pattern to clientID – at least when dealing with non-repeating values.

The bulk of the guide is technology-agnostic and principles-based; therefore, it is applicable regardless of application platform or technology. However, this edition includes specific Microsoft and .NET Framework technology considerations to help you choose the best technology for your solution from among the available technologies; it also includes information about how to make the most of these technologies in particular situations.

Log Parser 2.x is, in my skewed perspective, the coolest tool Microsoft has ever released. It easily ranks up there with the tools that Winternals\Systernals release (like Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, etc.) The tool is a basic swiss-knife for log files that a administrator can tear through file after file and strip out all the interesting data. In my world, I focus on two major inputs – IIS Log files & Event Viewer.

All commands can be hidden/shown by using the Power Commands options page. You can find the options page by going to the View menu -> Options, then choose Power Commands from the list. This is also where you can change the path used for the Visual Studio installation (used by the VS20xx Command Prompt commands).

MassTransit is lean service bus implementation for building loosely coupled applications using the .NET framework.

If you are a student, particularly a college student taking a science, math,engineering, any kind of computer or IT, or design course, did you know you can get almost every title that Microsoft makes for free? And even if you aren’t a “STEM-D” (science, technology, engineering, math & design) student, you can get some of the core developer technologies for free.