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So exactly how should you compare file and path names in .NET programs?  Ordinal case insensitive comparisons are the correct approach according to this MSDN article.

I recently had the need/desire to dynamically generate some code in .NET.  It's not something you tend to do a lot unless you are creating a compiler, so it was an interesting experience.  In the end it didn't solve my problem, but it was educational none-the-less. First I'll describe the scenario of the problem I was trying to solve ...

Here's another useful VS macro.  When I write code there are always weird edge cases that I think of while so I like to liberally sprinkle // TODO: comments around.  When you do this though you should always put in your alias and the date.  That way someone who comes across your comment knows who to ask for further details, or ...

I love msbuild.  Before it came along I was a big nant user, but now I'm an msbuild convert.  It's not perfect, but it sure is better than batch files.  It really, really needs embeddable code snippets, and a debugger but once it has those it will totally rock.  If you are writing a program that needs to run ''scripts'' ...

I just spent an annoying amount of time figuring out how to do this because sadly our documentation is so bad.  So I'm going to blog it quickly so that I at least have a record of what I did and hopefully someone else will find it useful.  Thanks go to Tim Murphy for providing about the only decent blog on this subject. First ...

In the project that I'm working on we wanted to have certain of our MSTest unit tests be available as standalone programs.  Various reasons for this include: It is useful for demos It's makes certain debugging scenarios a little easier, i.e. those where multiple VS instances are required. It avoids having to remember the mstest command ...

Some platform features are like the stuff hiding under rocks at the seashore. No, I don't mean the one's that are slimey and stinky. I'm talking about the one's that are interesting but hard to spot. But, all you need to do is catch a glimpse of them and lift the rock... Sometime last year, I was reading a page in the MSDN documentation when a ...

Boy, I seem to spend all my time in the deep dark recesses of the CLR. OK, this post is a little bit out there; I hope someone finds it useful. There's a problem with doing instrumented profiling of applications in Visual Studio 2005 Team System that comes up when working with strongly named assemblies. The problem is quite simply that ...

I seem to have come across this several times in the past week or two, so it's worth making a note.  In .NET 2.0 XmlValidatingReader is obsolete.  You need to do something like the following in order to create a validating reader now: XmlReaderSettings settings = new XmlReaderSettings(); settings.ValidationType = ...

You find yourself facing a seemingly broken logon screen.  Every character you type seems to come out as some other character.  Perhaps you know JohnL-S had something to do with configuring that system.  You type ASDF and it comes out AOEU.   What’s going on? It was brought to my attention this morning that many of you ...