Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Tag : C#

Marshal.ReleaseComObject Considered Dangerous

March 1, 2010 Mar 1, 2010 03/1/10
Visual Studio Blog
This post describes a problem we encountered and solved during the development of Visual Studio 2010 when we rewrote some components in managed code. In this post I’ll describe the problem and what we did to solve it. This is a rather lengthy technical discussion and I apologize in advance for its dryness. It’s not essential to understand ...

MSBuild Task Factories: guest starring Windows Powershell

February 20, 2010 Feb 20, 2010 02/20/10
Andrew Arnott
One of the cool new features of MSBuild 4.0 is the extensible task factory.  Task factories allow you to include scripts directly in your project file (or an imported .targets file) and have those scripts parsed and executed by your favorite interpreter.  Those scripts might even be C# or VB.NET code snippets that get compiled into ...

Covariance and Contravariance FAQ

February 16, 2010 Feb 16, 2010 02/16/10
Visual Studio Blog
In this post I’ll try to answer the most common questions I find on forums and in documentation feedback about C# covariance and contravariance. It’s a big topic for a single blog post, so expect to see a lot of “more information” links. Special thanks to Eric Lippert and Chris Burrows for reviewing and providing helpful comments. ...

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 – Part 1 : Introduction

February 16, 2010 Feb 16, 2010 02/16/10
Visual Studio Blog
This is the first part in a seven part series. Links to the other parts are included at the bottom of this post. Now that the Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2010 is publicly available, we’ve started receiving questions from inquisitive users about how Visual Studio 2010 itself was built. In particular, one questioner wanted to know ...

What is the difference between “dynamic” and “object” keywords?

January 25, 2010 Jan 25, 2010 01/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
Let’s take a quick look at the object keyword first. I’m not going to talk a lot about it because it’s been around since C# 1.0. This keyword is nothing more than a shortcut for System.Object, which is the root type in the C# class hierarchy. (However, as Eric Lippert pointed out in his blog post, not everything in C# derives from object...

How to read/write the new Visual C++ project properties

January 14, 2010 Jan 14, 2010 01/14/10
Andrew Arnott
Visual C++ 2010 introduces several new project and tool properties, and deprecates some old ones.  If you’re writing a project template or Visual Studio extension that needs to programmatically read and write the new properties, you will find that these properties are not available on the standard VCConfiguration, VCCLCompilerTool, etc. set...

Searching and Navigating Code in Visual Studio 2010

January 13, 2010 Jan 13, 2010 01/13/10
Visual Studio Blog
Every developer knows that navigating code is vital to happy and productive coding. We’ve added several new features for code search and navigation in Visual Studio 2010, including Navigate To and an improved Call Hierarchy, to complement search staples like the Find and Replace dialog and Incremental Search. With such a wide variety of ...

Getting Information About Objects, Types, and Members with Expression Trees

January 6, 2010 Jan 6, 2010 01/6/10
Visual Studio Blog
Starting with C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008, you can use expression trees to get information about objects, types, and members. In this post I’m going to show some examples and explain what benefits you can get by using this technique. If you are not familiar with expression trees, I would recommend reading Charlie Calvert’s blog post ...

Feedback usabilla icon