After working a little over 2 years with the VSTS Architect SKU I’ve decide to take on a new role at Microsoft. I am taking a job with the Visual Basic Core Compiler team. This is an exciting oppuritunity for me to get back to a lot of the topics I worked with in college. Expect me to be showing up with more regularity on VB newsgroups and forums.

While I was looking into CAS changes in 2.0 I found some very good news about thread changes in 2.0. In .NET 2.0 both Thread.CurrentPrincipal and the Thread Impersonation token are now propagated amongst threads including ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem. The latter was a great pain to developers in .NET 1.0 particularly because Thread.CurrentPrincipal did not propagate and it created a lot of funny code to deal with the CAS impacts.

Recently after I made my original post titled ‘PInvoke with 32 and 64 bit’, a developer emailed me. They pointed out that there is an internal structure that dynamically resizes based on the architecture; IntPtr. IntPtr will be size of the native chip pointer value. So for values like size_t that map to the pointer size, you can use the Address field of IntPtr.

One of the big difficulties still remaining in .NET 2.0 is the interoping with native API’s which takes in types that have different sizes on 32 and 64 bit machines. For most API’s this is not a problem. But for many, including most of the memory API’s for example, the signature is technically different from 32 to 64 bit with respect to parameter size.

Just ran accross this site. It’s very helpful if you deploy any ClickOnce application