Microsoft has just released the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1): Release Candidate (RC).

The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems.  The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK.

The following is a small sampling of what’s new or updated in this SDK:

• Documentation – Approximately 80% of the SDK documentation set has been refreshed
• Headers/Libraries – numerous new and updated – please see What’s New in the Windows API under the top-level Getting Started section in the documentation
• Samples – Over 200 new and/or updated samples
• Tools – Several new tools added
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 C++ command line compiler toolset and matching CRT

Windows SDK
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Sometimes it’s important to understand the order of events that occur when a WinForms Form is opened, closed, shown or hidden.  There are also a few “gotchas” that are important to know.

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The C# decimal keyword denotes a 128-bit data type.  Compared to floating-point types, the decimal type has a greater precision and a smaller range, which makes it suitable for financial and monetary calculations.

Approximate Range: ±1.0 × 10−²⁸ to ±7.9 × 10²⁸

Precision:  28-29 significant digits

.NET Type:  System.Decimal

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Two social networking news sites have emerged for .NET developers: DotNetKicks and the new .NET Shoutout.  Both sites provide tons of .NET news and information, if you’re willing to spend the time to dig through it all.  But for busy developers, there is a new .NET news site that cuts through all the clutter.  

Dot-Net-News.com provides the latest news and information about the Microsoft .NET development environment including C#, Visual Basic and Visual Studio.  No fluff, no spam, just the facts, man.

Here are some of the latest .NET news stories:

• .NET RIA Services
• Help Shape the Future of ASP.NET
• ViewModel Tool 3.0
• MVC Contrib v1.0
• Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK 0.5
• IronRuby 0.3
• Microsoft Ajax 4.0 Preview 4
• ASP.NET MVC v1.0 Source
• Silverlight 3 Tools Beta

Subscribe to the feed today to get your steady-stream of .NET news!

It’s common UI courtesy to show the Wait cursor when performing a long operation that requires the user to wait.  Here is how the Wait cursor appears in Windows Vista:

But developers often go about this the wrong way by setting the Cursor.Current property as follows:

Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;

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Sometimes you may need to display or print an input string that contains binary characters.  The following function replaces all binary characters in a string with a blank.  You can easily modify this method to remove other undesirable characters (such as high-ASCII) if needed.

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NP .NET Profiler Tool is designed to assist in troubleshooting issues such as slow performance, memory related issues, and first chance exceptions in any .NET process.  The tool has the following features:

• XCopy deployable: no install or reboot required
• Supports all types of .NET applications
• Generates true callstacks for exceptions, memory allocations, and function calls
• Can monitor a specific namespace to reduce overhead and generate a smaller output file
• Memory profiler reports total number of objects allocated per function
• Custom reports using SQL-like queries
• Wizard-based UI
• Supports all versions of .NET (1.0 , 1.1, 2.0 and 3.5)
• Supports all platforms (x86, x64 and IA64)
• Supports all OSes (Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows 2008 and Vista)
• Support virtual machines

Download NP .NET Profiler

See more .NET news!

Want insight into the design and development of C#?  Then check out these blogs by key members of the Microsoft C# development team:

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Closing all forms in an application seems like it would be a simple task of using a foreach loop in the Application.OpenForms collection, such as:

foreach (Form form in Application.OpenForms)
{
    form.Close();
}

But there are two problems.

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It’s easy to read a string one line at a time.  Here is a console program that demonstrates how:

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