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Advocacy and Innovation

Immutable collections with mutable performance

In my last post, I detailed the differences among read/write, read only, frozen and immutable collection types.  I described how immutable collections come with a hit to the garbage collector due to the garbage they generate during mutations.  I have a very positive update on that topic. My previous implementation for the ...

Read only, frozen, and immutable collections

[Update: a more recent post with new data on attainable performance of immutable collections] The topics of immutability and functional programming has fascinated me lately.  Mostly because of my work on the Visual Studio Common Project System (CPS) which is a large, highly multi-threaded code base that only remains sane because of its...

GZip encoder for Compact WCF

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...

OpenID and ASP.NET web sites

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...

Workaround for XmlSerializer T[] and List bug

The XmlSerializer in NetCF 2.0 has a bug where if a single serialization requires reflecting into types that use a mixture of Collection<T>-like types for the same T the XmlSerializer will throw an exception.  Here an example where CF 2.0 would crash: This type would fail to serialize under NetCF 2.0 because T = string would ...

Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 CTP released

The .NET Compact Framework team just released the Consumer Technology Preview (CTP) of the Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5.  These Power Toys are tools to help you build, debug and optimizie your NetCF 3.5 applications.  My personal favorite is the NetCF ServiceModel Metadata Tool (NetCFSvcUtil.exe) which allows NetCF ...