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Microsoft has launched the 'Bing Code Search add-on'  for Visual Studio, representing companionship between the Bing, Visual Studio and Microsoft Research divisions. The Bing Code Search extension directly assimilates the code snippet search for C# with other languages, coming later into the Visual Studio.  As this add-on is a part of the Visual Studio, programmers will be able to use it to search for the code samples from a number of web-based repositories including MSDN, StackOverflow, Donnetperls and CSharp411. So, if you are using Microsoft Visual Studio for building apps, you can download the add-on, activate it, type the search string, press enter and you will get a couple of options that are suitable for your project.  You can grab the add-on from the Visual Studio directory page However, the add-on can be used to search for the code samples anywhere on the Web as well; Microsoft says that the sites it has shortlisted should be “more than sufficient” for most of

Overload resolution has always been an area of frequent attention for compiler team. So, once again there are some major changes done to make the compiler more intelligent. Let's have a look at the below snippet(picked from MSDN) first and try to predict the output: Output in Visual Studio 2010: ExampleMethod: p2 is object Output in Visual Studio 2012/13: ExampleMethod: p2 is string Explanation of code: In above code, there are two overloads with a difference of 3rd parameter params and bit a different ordering of parameters. Visual Studio 2010 picks the overload without params parameter whereas Visual Studio 2012 compiler is smarter and picks the overload which has more specific type. If all your overloads do precisely the same thing, then this change will not be a problem. But in other cases, it may lead to crashes or exceptions. So, going forward, be careful while offering method overloads.

As most of you are aware that there are lot of language and compiler changes has happened with recent release of .Net, but all the issues will not arise until and unless you are recompiling your code. Once you recompile your code, these changes will be introduced regardless of which framework you target. Today I am writing about one of these breaking changes happened in .Net 4.5.  With earlier framework, named and optional parameter concept was introduced and unfortunately it was implemented incorrectly. In essence, there was a issue with the evaluation order of named parameter and will occur only when you are using methods as an argument.  Let's have a look at this snippet taken from MSDN: Expected output: A C B Output in Visual Studio 2010: C B A Output in Visual Studio 2012/2013: A C B Hope by this time, you are convinced about this incorrectness.  Please note, here issue is with named parameters and has nothing to do with optional parameters. This iss

Prior to this post, I have already discussed few ways of handling INotifyPropertyChanged interface. Now you might be thinking what's next ? Well, today I'll talk about much better and cleaner way of handling this interface, which is type-safe as well as less error prone. Till now, as a common practice, we were passing a property name as a parameter of our RaisedPropertyChanged method, which unfortunately has some demerits.  Let's say, what if user changed the name of the property and forgot to change the parameter passed inside RaisedPropertyChanged method. Now you might say that we can get rid of this by using Reflection. Even I agree with that but again it comes with an additional associated cost. So, what's the solution now??? Enough of worries, this issue has been addressed in .Net 4.5, in which developer can get rid of this parameter passing approach. Impressed? An attribute titled  CallerMemberName relieves us from all the worries because now this attribut

Today while surfing internet, I came across a very interesting interview snippet from Anders Hejlsberg and Charles Torre, in which they talked about the future version of C#, which will be 6.0. I hope most of you are aware that .Net version shipped with Visual Studio 2013 was the minor release with numbers as 4.5.1, which was just an upgrade of version 4.5. It is expected that all the major changes will be part of .Net 5.0 which will be shipped with Visual Studio 2014. Another nice thing which came out is, C# 6.0 will be based on the new compiler Roslyn, which is written in C# itself rather than C++. We can also expect some of the very cool features of C# 6.0 as: Primary Constructors Readonly auto properties Static type using statements Property expressions Method expressions Params for enumerables Monadic null checking Constructor type parameter inference Inline declarations for out params All the probable features of C# 6.0 will make life of developers bit more eas

Most of us might be aware that Microsoft is going to rename it's one of the cloud storage service SkyDrive soon due to disputes with one of the UK firm named  British Sky Broadcasting Group. You can find this official announcement at blog by Ryan Gavin.

Nowadays MVVM is one of the most common architectural structure and hope most of us working on WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone or Windows Store apps might have come across this. When talking about MVVM, the first thing which strikes in mind is INotifyPropertyChanged interface. The usual and most common practice of implementing INotifyPropertyChanged is: public class ViewModelBase : INotifyPropertyChanged     {         public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;         protected void RaisePropertyChanged(string prop)         {             if (PropertyChanged != null)             {                 PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(prop));             }         }     } What do you think about the above code? In first sight, it looks correct, but is it really perfect or thread safe? Well, here answer is NO. One very minor thing is missing in above code which can lead your application to crash in multi-threaded environment. If you will inspec

In continuation to my previous article titled ' Dynamically selecting DataTemplate for WPF ListView ', in this article, I am discussing about the alternative way to achieve the same goal. But here, to make the example simple, I am going to display only Employee names as shown below: Now this to achieve this, I am going to inherit MarkupExtension class provided by Microsoft. This class will give me the DataTemplate. If you will explore further, you will came to know that this MarkupExtension class has only one method named as ProvideValue, which will return me the appropriate template based on the supplied value.  Before inheriting MarkupExtension, I created a class named MyDataTemplateDictionary, which will inherit Dictionary<object, DataTemplate>. Please note, here key will be my DataTemplate name and value will be the DataTemplate. Below is the code depicting the same: Next comes is the class inheriting MarkupExtension. As there is nothing

Recently I get a chance to work on a project in which requirement was to select different different types of data templates based on the data. I faced bit difficulty, but afterwards I was manage to get it work. Let's have a look at the scenario first: Inside a WPF ListView, there are two GridViewColumns for storing Name and Age. Now requirement is to highlight the name of the person based on certain age criteria. If age is below 25, then name should be highlighted as red else it should be in green color, with desired background. I know there are ways to implement this using the concept of triggers, but I personally refrain from using triggers due to performance fall back. So, what else ??? The option left was dynamically selecting data templates. In this post I am going to write about the simplest approach and later on I'll do the same thing using Dictionary. Well, let's begin with our code. First of all, I created a class named Employee and added some data which w

Recently I was working on a XAML based application, in which my requirement was to play a sound (.wav file) whenever a given button is clicked. So, to achieve this, I wrote a below snippet: My above snippet worked but at the same time, I feel a noticeable delay in beep sound and that make me analyze further and write a blog post :) Now question is, why there is delay between button click and sound ??? Well, there is a simple concept behind it, which I missed while implementing above requirement :( Reason is, the event hierarchy.  Most of us might be aware that Click is a bubbling event, which means event will be fired from the control who initiated it. So, in our case, whenever button is clicked, it bubbles from button to window. And that's the reason, click event handler is executing before the window event is triggered, which is ultimately leading to delay. Now, how to handle this??? Method 1: Then I thought to write a preview event, which will be fired