Browse by Tags

Visual Studio Tip: Show Threads in Source
29 May 12 12:20 PM | pavely | 1 comment(s)

Debugging multithreaded applications is always hard, so any help we can get from the debugger is appreciated. Here’s one tip that can help using Visual Studio 2010 when many threads are running at the same time, some of which run similar code.It’s tedious to lookup each thread’s call stack to see where its next instruction pointer is located. Here’s the Threads window in action: To find the actual source line each thread is at the breakpoint moment, we’ll need to switch to that thread by double clicking...

תגים:Visual Studio, Debugging, DEV, Multithreading, .NET 4, Visual Studio 2010

WPF 4.5 Cookbook
26 April 12 07:40 PM | pavely | with no comments

A few months back, I was approached by Packt publishing , asking me to write a WPF book, in their “cookbook” style, and I accepted. I haven’t written an entire book before, but I have written dozen of courses for Hi-Tech College, John Bryce Training and now for CodeValue , in a range of topics, from Windows Internals and device driver development, to advanced C++, to basic and advanced .NET topics, to WPF, and even some oddities such as the Windows Media Foundation . Writing a book, however, is different...

תגים:.NET, C#, DEV, XAML, WPF, Visual Studio 2010, C# 5.0, .NET 4.5, Visual Studio 11

Parallel Programming Open House Session
01 December 11 05:34 PM | pavely | with no comments

Today I presented a half-day session on Multithreading & Parallel Programming at John Bryce center in Tel Aviv. Thank you all for attending! I certainly enjoyed presenting these fascinating topics. I’ve attached the demos I showed. The presentation will be sent to those who attended by email. Thank you! ParallelDemos

תגים:C#, OpenDay, DEV, Task Parallel Library, .NET 4, Visual Studio 2010, C# 5.0, .NET 4.5, Visual Studio 11

My C# 5.0 Async Session at Microsoft
22 November 11 03:36 PM | pavely | with no comments

Today I presented a session on C# 5.0 asynchronous programming. Thank you all for coming, it was a pleasure to present this interesting stuff. The presentation and demos are attached to this post. The NetFlix and RSS aggregator demos are part of the Async CTP installation. Any questions or comments are very welcome! OpenHouseAsyncProgC#5.NET4.5.zip OpenHouseAsyncProgC#5.NET4.5.zip

תגים:.NET, C#, OpenDay, DEV, Visual Studio 2010, C# 5.0, .NET 4.5, Visual Studio 11

Mandelbrot Set with C# 5.0 Async support
21 November 11 07:09 PM | pavely | 3 comment(s)

I’ve always been fascinated by the Mandelbrot set . It’s an intriguing set, and the fractals created are truly mind boggling. (for more information on the Mandelbrot, and other such sets, you can start with the above Wikipedia link). As part of my preparation for tomorrow’s session on C# 5.0 asynchronous programming, I’ve decided to create a WPF application to view and explore the Mandelbrot set, while taking advantage of those new asynchronous features. This turned out to be rather fun. Here’s the...

תגים:.NET, C#, DEV, WPF, Numerics, Visual Studio 2010, C# 5.0, .NET 4.5

The Roslyn Project CTP is Available for Download
19 October 11 11:54 PM | pavely | with no comments

The so called “Roslyn” project from Microsoft has been finally released with this early CTP. What is “Roslyn”? It’s an attempt to make the internals of a C# or VB compiler exposed. The usual way we think about a compiler is as a black box – some input goes in – some output comes out. During the compilation process, the compiler builds various tables and gathers a lot of information on the input. After the output is generated, the compiler throws everything away. That’s really too bad. In today’s...

תגים:.NET, C#, ReSharper, DEV, Visual Basic, Intellisense, Visual Studio 2010, Roslyn

Some of My Favorite Small C++11 Features
13 October 11 04:25 PM | pavely | with no comments

The new C++11 standard, finally finalized (pun intended) contains dozens of features, both in the language and in the libraries. Some of those features are pretty complex (or at least less often used), but some are practically essential, and have been sorely missed (at least by me) since forever. Here’s a quick list of those small, simple, features that I like. it’s sometimes surprising to C# or Java developers that some of these features didn’t exist in C++ prior to C++11 (technically, C++03 or...

תגים:C++, DEV, C++0X, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 11, C++11

Porting an XNA game from Windows to Windows Phone (Part 1)
08 August 11 09:58 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

XNA is one of the two APIs that’s supported on Windows Phone 7 (the other being Silverlight), so a natural thing to do is to port an already existing XNA game (running on Windows or XBOX 360) to the new Windows Phone 7 platform. I wanted to see how easy (or maybe not so easy) it would be to do the actual porting. My starting point is a relatively simple 2D game, the one developed throughout the XNA 2D tutorial I did a some months back. We’ll start with the final game project (discussed in the last...

תגים:XNA, DEV, Fun, Visual Studio 2010, Games, Windows Phone

Some Short Videos I Made
26 May 11 02:30 PM | pavely | with no comments

I’ve created a few short videos, covering some introductory material – still may be useful for some… The audio quality is not the best possible, but should be fairly understandable. All the videos are in Hebrew (sorry, non-Hebrew speakers! You can still watch me type code samples, it may have some value) The videos are: Introduction to C# 5.0 asynchronous programming Introduction to the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) Understanding XAML (Part 1) Understanding XAML (Part 2)   They are also...

תגים:video, .NET, C#, Silverlight, DEV, XAML, WPF, .NET 4, Visual Studio 2010, C# 5.0

Async CTP Refresh Available
13 April 11 07:41 PM | pavely | 1 comment(s)

A refresh of the Async CTP that was available for VS 2010 RTM has been released. This one may be installed on top of VS 2010 SP1. You can now take advantage of the async and await keywords. The demos I showed at the session I presented a few weeks back can now be actually tested with this new CTP. Download it here .

תגים:.NET, DEV, Visual Studio 2010, C# 5.0

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta: What’s new in MFC?
25 December 10 03:23 PM | pavely | with no comments

The recently released Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta brings many enhancements and bug fixes found since the product’s launch, most of them in the managed world. However, there are new enhancements to the good(?) old MFC , namely wrapping of some of the Direct2D interfaces. Direct2D is a new layer in the DirectX world, sitting on top of Direct3D, providing high performance and flexible 2D graphics. It was introduced with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, but it’s also possible to install it on Windows Vista...

תגים:MFC, C++, DEV, Graphics, Native Development, Visual Studio 2010, DirectX

My TechEd Session: MEF & Unity
02 December 10 08:52 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

My session was scheduled for the last time slot of the conference. I was really glad to see so many of you there, especially considering that many people were on their flights back home and there was Alex ’s XNA session right next door. Thank you all for coming! I talked about the idea of Inversion of Control (IoC) and one way of achieving that, through Dependency Injection (DI). The slides can be downloaded from here , and the demos from here . In the old COM days, the legendary Don Box (now at...

תגים:.NET, C#, DEV, .NET 4, Visual Studio 2010, TechEd2010, teched_il, Unity, MEF, Design

Compilers and Parsing
22 April 10 01:19 PM | pavely | 6 comment(s)

I’ve always been fascinated by compilers. They seem almost magical, translating some source language to a target language or object code. And even though I understand how they work, it’s still looks like magic. Compilation relies on parsing, which is one of the more difficult parts of a typical compiler. There are several ways to do parsing, most of them using some automated code generation tools (the classics being lex (techinally the scanner, or tokenizer) and yacc (the parser), with later versions...

תגים:.NET, C#, PARSING, DEV, Visual Studio 2010

The Return of the Class Wizard
24 January 10 10:20 AM | pavely | with no comments

Visual C++ 6 aficionados remember (fondly) the Class Wizard, most useful in MFC applications. The Class Wizard has gone away in later version of Visual Studio (2002, 2003, 2005, 2008), but is now making a smashing return in Visual Studio 2010 (Project menu –> Class Wizard or Ctrl+Shift+X). This has the familiar options (relative to VC++ 6), such as adding/removing message handlers, command and update command handlers, creating new classes, member variables, etc. There are new options, such as...

תגים:MFC, C++, DEV, Visual Studio 2010