The .NET Framework allows you to easily add metadata to your classes by using attributes. These attributes can be ones that the .NET Framework already provides, of which there are over 300, or you can create your own. Using reflection, the ways to retrieve the custom attributes of a type... Read more

Corrupted state exceptions are designed to help you have fewer bugs in your code by making it harder to make common mistakes around exception handling. A very common pattern is code like this: public void FileSave(String name) {... Read more

Now that Visual Studio 2010 has been released, there are a lot of extensions being written. In fact, as of today (May 1, 2010 at 15:40 UTC) there are 809 results for Visual Studio 2010 in the Visual Studio Gallery. If you filter this list to show just the... Read more

I have previously talked about Microsoft StyleCop. For those that might not know about it, StyleCop is a source analysis tool (different from the static analysis that FxCop performs) that analyzes the source code directly. As a result, it focuses on more design (or style) issues such as layout,... Read more

Every so often a question comes up about how Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and a .NET programming language relate to each other. Mostly, these questions have to do with versions. The reality is that these are actually three different “products” that are versioned independently of each other but are... Read more