Aaron Lerch

There’s been a bit of talk on Twitter recently about the various twitter clients that exist, with more being created practically every day. One view was that everybody is trying to create the ultimate twitter client.

Maybe.
Certainly there are a lot of new twitter client apps being made, some with lofty aspirations, but more importantly I […]

I’m ready to confess. It’s time to lay it all on the table. Ready?
I can’t keep up!
Wow, that was liberating! I think I should start a taxi service for developers.
There is so much going on in the world of software, how can I keep up with it all, while still making progress in my […]

Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 have built-in support for refactoring code, including renaming namespaces, classes, variables, and more. Add-ins like Resharper also have support for refactoring by renaming. These tools work great, and have good integration into the Visual Studio IDE, for example being able to preview each change and exclude false positive matches. I […]

Did you know you can use most of the new C# 3.0 language features in VS2008 under a project that’s targeted at .NET 2.0? How cool is that? And it makes sense, too, since there’s nothing new for the 2.0 runtime, it’s all compiler magic. I found it by accident - I found Daniel Moth’s […]

Recently I wanted to use a WinForms TextBox with some “watermark text”, but had some trouble finding anything existing on the web. Which was surprising because of how ubiquitous they are. Turns out the terminology varies: cue, prompt, or watermark. And “watermark” is the least used.
Once I got my ducks in a row (by perusing […]

I’ve been working on a set of Powershell Cmdlets to fully replace the symstore.exe utility that is included with the Debugging Tools for Windows. (To be released as open source when I’m done.) When I think about writing Cmdlets, I tend to think that the best approach is to create an API and then wrap […]

I was exploring symstore.exe with Depends just now and came across a function in dbghelp that’s clearly not in the documentation. I got a nice chuckle out of it.

What sort of “fun” (not nasty!) function names do you tend to create? Or do you keep them all boring plain Jane? (Boooo!!) The way […]

Visual Studio 2005 made using embedded resources a much more integrated experience than it was in Visual Studio 2003. But what I didn’t know is that there are some important things to be aware of when referencing these resources. A leaky abstraction strikes again!
The Problem
Even though it “seems” like a static resource, accessed via a […]

This was probably my favorite Visual Studio 2005 tip I learned in the Mastering .NET Debugging class I recently took. John Robbins is awesome. This tip lets you set a breakpoint at any arbitrary location - no source code required! Think framework library, or 3rd party library, or any commonly called code (that you […]

Our internal custom tracing library was recently updated, and I’ve been working on doing some extensive search-and-replaces to incorporate the changes. At first, I thought I could use Visual Studio to quickly do the bulk of it with it’s handy Find and Replace in Files, even with it’s “bastardized syntax“. But I ran […]