Microsoft MSDN Blogs
blogs.msdn.com · Company blog · on HN since 2007
Microsoft employees' blogs on MSDN cover Windows, Visual Studio, C++, and C# internals, including Raymond Chen's and Eric Lippert's posts.
What HN saysCommenters link it for technical references like Eric Lippert's series on covariance and contravariance in C#, plus Visual Studio announcements.
1.6KHN people shared it
879linked it in comments
2.1Kstories submitted
38Kstory points
3 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Why Was Pinball Removed from Windows Vista?30 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · 2 comments on HN
- 2Visual C++ Team Blog: C99 library support in Visual Studio 201310 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 3Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?9 people · 501 points · first shared 2012 · 142 comments on HN
- 408 5923509 people · first shared 2011
- 5Everybody thinks about garbage collection the wrong way (2010)8 people · 85 points · first shared 2010 · 43 comments on HN
- 6Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture8 people · 56 points · first shared 2012 · 39 comments on HN
- 7VC11 (vNext) to have abysmal support for C++118 people · 6 points · first shared 2011 · 6 comments on HN
- 8Exceptions: cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize (2005)8 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 9Why I Left Google7 people · 1.3K points · first shared 2012 · 306 comments on HN
- 10Windows 8 devices to have retina display7 people · 26 points · first shared 2012 · 29 comments on HN
- 11Oldnewthing7 people · first shared 2008
- 12Closing over the loop variable considered harmful7 people · first shared 2010
- 13Why is the DOS path character "\"?6 people · 273 points · first shared 2011 · 66 comments on HN
- 14Chuck Moore's Creations6 people · 207 points · first shared 2013 · 72 comments on HN
- 15Building the next generation file system for Windows: ReFS6 people · 126 points · first shared 2012 · 43 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
sosuke · 2015-12-09
I could not agree more. Windows Live/Essentails Photo Gallery is the best tool for keeping the file as the source of record. I evaluated several photo face tagging tools and it was the best as far as leaving meta data in the file and updating the file information properly. Picasa and Photos/iPhoto just couldn't seem to do it and each has a separate database.
Check out this post from 2006 where they talk about it and some cases where they can't "truth in the file" that seem like a very reasonable list of circumstances.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pix/archive/2006/08/16/702780.aspx
Splines · 2015-12-01
xperf/wpr. Launch wprui, select First Level Triage and Disk I/O and File I/O, make sure logging mode is set to Memory, then click Start.
Let it run for a minute, click Stop, then open up the generated ETL in WPA.
From there it's hard to tell you what to do in WPA. Documentation isn't the greatest, but this link is close to what you're trying to do: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_pfe_blog/archive/2013/03/19/troubleshootin…
Drag in the relevant graphs into your current view, and understand how the yellow bar aggregates data. MSSQL probably has event providers - you might want to look those up and add them to wprui when you generate your ETL.
solutionyogi · 2015-11-21
Eric Lippert did a great series on covariance and contravariance and how they are implemented in C# and various design decisions which went in to it. I would highly recommend it if you use C#.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/tags/covariance+and+contra…
voltagex_ · 2015-11-18
Oatseller · 2015-11-04
I originally found this on MSDN BLOGS: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_student_developer_blog/archive/2015/…
Like Nick Bowmen (18) and Nelson Liu (18, pictured left). The duo
forms team ASLSpeak - winner of both the Microsoft Hack Award and the
EMC Isilon Hack Award.
Knowing they wanted to create something to help the disabled in some
way, they came up with an idea that aims to aid American Sign Language
(ASL) speakers.
Truly inspiring work.
github link: https://github.com/nelson-liu/ASLSpeak
Chlorus · 2015-09-25
My new favorite: "I have discovered a critical security vulnerability in Windows which I intend to present at the XYZ conference. It allows any user with administrator privileges to perform operation Q, something that should be available only to SYSTEM."
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/09/23/10643223.aspx
scholia · 2015-08-19
> The discoverability is pretty much the same as the old pull-downs and toolbar approach
One of the main points -- possibly the main point -- of the move to the ribbon was to increase discoverability, and it worked. Gates said Microsoft had lots of compliments about new features in office 2007 that had actually been in the old version, but people hadn't found them.
Microsoft did an enormous amount of work (and research) when developing the ribbon. Jensen Harris covered this in great depth in an 8-part series at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_3f00_/defa…
I'm pretty sure you can find videos of him giving presentations about it as well. (I saw him present.)
taspeotis · 2015-07-22
> Microsoft will support IE until Jan 2016.
Uh... [1]
Beginning January 12, 2016, the following operating systems
and browser version combinations will be supported:
Windows Vista SP2 Internet Explorer 9
Windows Server 2008 SP2 Internet Explorer 9
...
After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet
Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive
technical support and security updates.
They go on to talk about how Windows 7's Enterprise Mode will be supported until 2020 so you can still keep IE kicking around well beyond 2016.
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-date-with-int…
pjc50 · 2015-07-06
Occasionally Raymond Chen's Old New Thing: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/
I would follow EEVblog if it were a proper text blog, but I don't have time for video or audio blogs.
gtani · 2015-06-14
since you got no response:
- scrapers, spider/crawler and content extractor for NLP analysis
- analyze your hard drive for old, duplicate etc files
- Arduino/raspberry pi (challenging, very little RAM, can't use c++11, stdlib, etc
- CUDA
_____________
also you want to look at VC++, clang and gnu toolsets, e.g. "#pragma once" and the C++14 refinements. Meyers Modern Effective and Effective 3rd ed books are great for that. Also Lippman et al's primer
_________________
compiler blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/
http://blog.llvm.org/
http://developerblog.redhat.com/tag/c/
coldpie · 2015-06-10
> growing organically by overworked developers hacking in whatever they needed right now
One of my personal favorite examples of this is the GetRandomRgn function in Windows's windowing API.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd144918%28v=…
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/06/18/10321212.aspx
mousetraps · 2015-06-05
This is in Visual Studio (works in the free community edition), and we have some azure VM images ready for you to spin up if you want to give it a try without installing windows
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/04/24/node-js-tools-…
Code and VS are different products, codebases, Etc. But if you see a specific feature you'd love to have in code or v.v., let us know, as we're always considering ways to collaborate wherever it makes sense.
nailer · 2015-06-03
If you're a Unix person looking to check out Powershell, the classic 'Rosetta Stone' got ported to Windows Server recently: https://certsimple.com/rosetta-stone . This allows you to find Windows equivalent commands of whatever version of Linux/Mac OS/SmartOS/OpenBSD you're using.
Interesting insight into 'new Microsoft': first two times Powershell team asked to add SSH, they were rejected. Now it's OK: see last paragraph of http://blogs.msdn.com/b/looking_forward_microsoft__support_for_secure_…
thaumasiotes · 2015-05-22
This perspective was best expressed by Raymond Chen (here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/08/13/10049634.aspx ):
> Finalizers are a Ouija board, permitting dead objects to operate "from beyond the grave" and affect live objects. As a result, when finalizers are involved, there is a lot of creepy spooky juju going on, and you need to tread very carefully, or your soul will become cursed.
Nelkins · 2015-05-22
One feature I'd really like to see would be the option of deploying a single binary (even if it's not a native binary; that would be really great, and I know the LILC effort is working toward something like that[1]). I know you can sort of accomplish this[2][3], but it would make me really happy if there were first class support for it.
[1]: https://github.com/dotnet/llilc/
[2]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mbarnett/ILMerge.aspx
[3]: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/02/03/jeffrey-ric…
bananaboy · 2015-05-02
That talk is interesting and it's be great to be able to build for iOS in VS, but other information that seems to be coming out around this is very confusing. This[1] blog post links to this MSDN article[2] which says "You can use Visual C++ for Cross-Platform Mobile Development to edit, debug and deploy iOS code to the iOS Simulator or to an iOS device, but because of licensing restrictions, the code must be built remotely on a Mac.".
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/04/29/what-s-new-with-c-cr…
[2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/dn707598%28v=vs.140%29.aspx?f=255&a…
e12e · 2015-04-28
It might not be usable/in use - but doesn't nuget support c++? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2013/04/26/nuget-for-c.aspx
> Anyone here unhappy with pip?
Pip has (had) a number of issues (mostly related to pypi/availability) -- but pip+virtualenvs is something I use all the time, and am very happy with.
The ease with which one can simply:
virtualenv some_experiment # --no-site-packages
# is now standard! yay!
./some_experiment/bin/pip install -U pip distribute
# sadly needed -- but gets us pip list --outated, which
# is very helpful
./some_experiment/bin/pip install <thing-to-test>
And then just work with that, without even having to mess around with sourcing the "activate" script etc for most packages is great. No clutter under /usr/local, no broken system tools due to some dependency being pulled in etc.
Someone · 2015-04-26
But Visual studio doesn't imply Microsoft's C++. There's clang-cl (http://clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersManual.html#clang-cl), which aims to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft's compiler (haven't used it, so I don't know its quality)
Also, Visual Studio 2015 will ship with clang (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/11/12/visual-studio-2015-p… Yes, that's for Android (and, in the future, iOS) only, but it would not surprise me if that it is a sign of things to come: either Microsoft starts following developments faster, or people will move to clang for development. And I doubt the current Microsoft would be bothered if their customers moved to use clang, as long as they kept using Microsoft technologies (even if that's limited to running on Azure)
pjmlp · 2015-04-17
Microsoft's official position is that any greenfield project should be in C++ and for those developers that really want a C compiler there are other options.
Specially in a world where most APIS are either .NET or transitioning to COM/Windows Runtime.
At last year's "Connect(); Microsoft Visual Studio vNext & Azure", they confirmed the C++ focus for native code, besides the upcoming .NET Native.
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Connect-event-2014/029
The C99 support that has been added was what is required by C++ standard and some specific customers.
Even the new C runtime is actually implemented in C++ with the functions exposed as extern "C".
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/06/10/the-great-crt-refact…
gtjrossi · 2015-03-26
The version of IE with Touch Events (Windows Phone 8.1 Update) is no longer in preview. You can buy retail devices with it on it today, actually.
For the desktop version, see my recent blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/02/24/pointer-events-w3c-recom…
danparsonson · 2015-03-21
Tess Ferrandez's blog is worth a look if you're doing .NET debugging (particularly outside of the IDE - she's a windbg wizard):
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tess/archive/tags/debugging/
She has written some labs covering common debugging scenarios:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tess/archive/2008/02/04/net-debugging-demos-in…
mcfunley · 2015-03-03
Another version of this story that I love uses the Russian Navy:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2005/05/12/417064.aspx
jbandela1 · 2015-02-02
I think this is awesome. For all the people that are complaining about not being open source and not friendly to hackers, the truth is probably most people that program Raspberry are not even using a native compiled language but are using Python. The people that want to hack on a kernel, can install Linux.
I am really excited about the prospect of Microsoft enabling writing and debugging for the Pi using Visual Studio. They already have the feature for android in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview[1] and making it work for Raspberry Pi on running Windows should be easy. With an excellent development environment and debugger, I think interest in C/C++ programming for the Pi will be increased as it will be more accessible.
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/12/05/developing-native-ac…
MichaelGG · 2015-01-29
The Ribbon is amazing when you have lots and lots of commands, many which aren't always commonly used. Few programs approach the sheer number of commands. IIRC, in Office 2007 it was like 1300?
One of the main designers ran a blog explaining the design process. Even if you hate the ribbon, the explanation of how they came to it (heavily driven by telemetry, eye tracking studies, etc) is pretty cool. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ri…
putzdown · 2015-01-16
Does anyone know how the support for C++11 is looking in this version? It would be pretty great if Microsoft could finally close [the gap](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/06/11/c-11-14-feature-tabl… on C++11 support a mere four years after GCC and Clang completed their support for the standard. That would also give some hope that Visual Studio might have full support for C++14 in a year or two (which GCC and Clang have today). Is there an updated support chart somewhere?
nutmeg · 2014-12-16
My favorite change lately is the one where they increased the version number on System.Web.Mvc in the GAC, thereby breaking almost all old ASP.NET MVC builds.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2014/10/16/microsoft-asp-net-mv…
The comments on this article have some great vitriol.
FesterCluck · 2014-12-16
He's likely referring to this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-sou…
.Net was recently open sourced, along with the compilers. MS also has put real effort into making it cross platfrom with great results.
As a C# & JavaScript developer, I'm floored with this. It's such a huge shift from the past. Yes, it's wonderful.
teovall · 2014-11-09
Stop. Just stop. This is why we can't have nice things.
Of course your application's icon should always be visible in the notification area. Everyone thinks their application should always be visible.
Your application should also always be pinned to the user's taskbar and start menu and should have an icon on the Desktop. It should start at Windows startup and pop up notifications randomly about insignificant things the user doesn't need to take action on.
Your application should also be topmost at all times. Even more topmost than other application's topmost windows.
Here's a great article about why you shouldn't do this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/922449.aspx
UnoriginalGuy · 2014-11-08
> There is PowerShell which gives you more flexibility, but in my experience I have found PowerShell to be slow.
Powershell can be a little slow to launch. Actual execution speed is pretty respectable. It does get faster after the first couple of times as it will ngen stuff into the GAC (this is particularly bad on new Windows installs where little .Net code has previously ran in any contexts).
It can be fixed by running a script like this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2008/09/02/speeding-up-powe…
Which will populate the GAC.
> It also has a totally different set of syntactic rules which aren't worth my time to learn.
You're missing out. Powershell's syntax is quite intuitive after you learn the basics, you quickly start to be able to guess commands and params.
danielki · 2014-11-03
There is a fantastic 2010 blogpost[1] from the Visual Studio Languages Product Manager that explains the rationale for supporting VB.NET as well as C#, as well as the strategy for doing so.
Of interest: he states that both languages have (had?) "roughly equal adoption".
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/scottwil/archive/2010/03/09/vb-and-c-coevoluti…