Andrew Arnott

Principal Software Engineer, Visual Studio Platform

Principal Software Engineer and OSS contributor. Visual Studio Platform.

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GZip encoder for Compact WCF

September 30th, 2008
The GZip encoder is not included in NetCF as it is on the desktop WCF, but it isn't hard to build yourself and in fact we have released a sample of exactly how to add your own GZip encoder to NetCF: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108652 So many people have asked me for it lately I thought I'd better just post the link.  Have...

If the MS Office team wrote Visual Studio

August 5th, 2008
Some humorous pros and cons to Visual Studio, if the Microsoft Office team were ever to take over. (disclaimer: this is a tongue in cheek post.  No offense -- only laughs intended...

Visual Studio trick to quickly find any file in solution

August 2nd, 2008
You know that Find text box in the toolbar of Visual Studio?  Those of us who are keyboard-inclined probably never use it because Ctrl+F is quicker than moving your hand to the mouse.  But there is a hidden gem of a feature inside it that really makes me feel like a power user that I wanted to share. That find box doubles as a ...

OpenID and ASP.NET web sites

April 14th, 2008
If you are a web developer I hope you've considered accepting OpenID credentials for logging in your users.  If you have an ASP.NET web site, the process of adding OpenID support to your web site couldn't be easier when you use the free C# DotNetOpenId library.  Supporting OpenID is a great idea...

Why you should never use TCHAR in C++ header files

February 22nd, 2008
In C++, TCHAR, LPCTSTR, CString, and other types discretely change to their char/WCHAR, CStringA/CStringW counterparts depending on whether UNICODE is defined in your source code.  Cool.  By conscientiously using _countof(x) instead of sizeof(x) where appropriate and TCHAR's everywhere instead of char/WCHAR, you can write code that ...

Why your Visual Studio add-in fails to load with error 0x80004005

February 15th, 2008
Writing Visual Studio add-ins gives you the power to do some impressive things within the IDE to enhance your productivity.  Unfortunately getting your add-in to load into Visual Studio can sometimes be a pain.  Here's just a tip you should know about the .AddIn file that Visual Studio generates for you. The path you provide to ...

Why double-clicking on an .SLN file doesn’t always launch Visual Studio

February 13th, 2008
Well this is my first post as a member of the Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem team.  My second full day on the job, and I've found some less-than-ideal areas of Visual Studio that I'm eager to improve for myself and for you, our customers.  How exciting.  I'll do my best to post to my blog whenever I run across some ...

Write a NetCF app that provisions your device from your device

February 4th, 2008
My first post in the provisioning series introduced what provisioning of your Windows Mobile device means and the basics of why you would want to do it.  In future posts I'll give some concrete examples of XML that accomplish a few common tasks.  But what good are XML examples if you can't try them out on your device or emulator?&...

Microsoft launches MSDN Code Gallery for open-source sharing

February 1st, 2008
Microsoft recently launched the MSDN Code Gallery for Microsoft employees and others to share code and software using the Microsoft Public License.  MSDN Code Gallery looks and feels very much like CodePlex, but Code Gallery lacks the TFS source control feature and developers can only publish their source code and binaries as releases.As ...

New job with Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem

January 24th, 2008
I have accepted a new position within Microsoft with the Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem team.  Rather than working on the .NET Compact Framework I will be working on "VS10".  I don't actually make the transition for a few more weeks, so I look forward to several more posts on NetCF topics before leaving...