Heh, you think it's not possible to leak memory from a managed application? Of course it is. For one thing, if you leak a thread, you will leak that whole thread's stack. Oh yes, there's more to memory than heaps. And there's more than one heap, too. You could mess up your interop and leak from the native heap, or you could even leak from the managed heap, generally as a result of an error somewhere other than the leaking code ... like a misbehaving finalizer that prevents some other finalizer from running, which prevents some other memory from being freed since it can't be freed till it's been finalized. Eeeeeww.

If none of this ever occurred to you before, and you're not scared to read more about it, check James Kovac's article in the January 2007 MSDN Magazine. He tells you how to notice leaks, track them down, and do something about them. (BTW, he's a Canadian MVP.) You'll also learn what a garbage collector does instead of buying a Porsche when it suffers a midlife crisis.

Kate

Ahmed's been running some Touchdown content in South Africa for ISVs who want to certify their applications on Vista. He's collected a nice set of links (about half of them were already purple for me) on the logo programs and things that will help you migrate to Vista. This stuff can be hard to find so having it in one place is very useful.

Kate

Last year I posted about a demonstration of tag clouds for US Presidential speeches, so you could see words like Constitution or economy wax and wane in the big-ticket political speeches over the centuries. Well now someone has done the same for Microsoft speeches over the decades. Watch Windows appear, or spot the Ballmer speeches, you'll find it a fun little pastime. I wish it had more consistency in the type of speeches used: testimony before Congress is never going to have the same words as a press release, but it's fun nonetheless.

Kate

The nice folks in the MVP program have decided I am still a Most Valued Professional for C++. Or to be specific, "Visual Developer - Visual C++". It's a delight as always to be among such company and I notice the C++ crowd has grown a bit this year. I really value my membership in this program.

Kate

From Ahmed in South Africa:

Bring up the calendar by clicking on the time in the taskbar. Now click on the month (for example December 2006). You will get a year view. Click on the year and you get a ten year view. Click on this and you get a century view.

This is fun!

You can drill back down any time -- just click on a cell and work your way back to the month of interest.

Kate

Microsoft has announced that the next Professional Developers Conference (PDC) will be October 2-5, 2007 in Los Angeles, with two days of pre-conference on September 30 and October 1. That's good news and bad news for me. I'm glad we're having a PDC this year because it means there's something to announce and something to get early bits of. The official word is:

The PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform.  PDC 2007 attendees will have the opportunity to access new code, learn about the latest Microsoft product offerings and hear from Microsoft executives about the various platform developments. 

Check http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/ for updates; you can also subscribe to the RSS feed to find out more information about the event as we get closer.  Registration will open in the May/June timeframe. 

So what's the bad news? LA, again. This will be three in a row. I wouldn't miss the PDC for anything but can't we go somewhere else?

Kate

Yes indeed, there will be a code camp in Toronto next year! It will be held Saturday, March 31st and the website is now ready for you to register as an attendee, a volunteer, or a speaker.

The Second Annual Toronto Code Camp, a free .NET community sponsored event, will be held on March 31^st, 2007! Last years event was a huge success with over 220 attendees, 4 tracks, 20 speakers, 25+ volunteers and over $17,000 in prizes given away. This year’s event will be even bigger and better! Registration is now open, but remember, space is limited and based on last years response it will fill up fast.

Deadline for speakers is Jan 15th, for volunteers Feb 15th, and for attendees there is no deadline, but it will "sell out" -- to the extent a free event can sell out. Trust me, you want to be there. If you don't normally attend Microsoft events or user group meetings, either for scheduling reasons or because you don't want to be "sold to" and you worry that might happen at such events, you should make a point of coming to Code Camp -- it's a grassroots community event and a great opportunity to learn from a wide variety of speakers on a wide variety of technologies. And if you can stand the thought of ever speaking some day, Code Camp is the classic place to start. We'll even help you become a speaker if you're interested.

Kate

Gee, ten minute talks on very specific technical topics... where have I heard that concept before? It really is something technical people need. Here are a bunch from MSDN in the UK along with a pretty nice UI to let you filter by technology, content level, even presenter if that's important to you. They seem to upload more about every other month.

I took a quick listen to "Wrapping Windows APIs with C++/CLI" and I liked it.

Kate