Peter Golde has published a note on his blog about the new MSDN TV video on Power Collections.

In the interview, Peter talks about the genesis of the project and various design decisions and he gives an overview of the library structure and the differences between the various collection classes. The whole project is kind of a collaboration between Peter, people at Microsoft who've helped launch the whole thing and a community built around Peter's blog and the PowerCollections forum.

One thing that Peter specifically talks about is the BigList class (see also this post). This is a class with a similar interface to the standard List class, but it's optimised to work efficiently with large lists, especially for operations like insertions, deletions, copies and concatenations. Peter explains the inner workings of the BigList in detail in the video.

Personally, I've been using PowerCollections for a while and I think it's certainly to be recommended as a well thought through collection library. I've also had my problems with parts of the design, but nothing insoluble... plus, PowerCollections is not yet final so some problems have to be expected.

I thought I'd pass on a collection of links to articles on debugging I've read today. Much of this is not new, but I guess I'm not the only one who doesn't feel the need to use additional debugging tools every day... meaning apart from those that are integrated in the IDE. I used to do much more of that when I did more development for Linux, but right now the VS integrated debugger is the only one I've been using for a while. I guess that may change, though, because I'm really positively surprised how much I've been missing! I advise everyone to have a look!

Here we go:

• Debugging tools for Windows download
• Fabrice's article Advanced debugging with SOS.dll, which made me have a closer look at this.
• Several articles on Mike Taulty's blog: A word for WinDbg, A word for WinDbg (2) and More on debugging with SOS.DLL - enter Visual Studio.
• An MSDN article by John Robbins: SOS: It's Not Just an ABBA Song Anymore
• Traversing the gc heap (and introducing PSSCOR.DLL) is an article about an extension to the SOS.DLL that has since been integrated in the default distribution.
• A Code Project article by Saikat Sen: Windows Debuggers: Part 1: A WinDbg Tutorial
• Another Code Project article by Toby Opferman: Debug Tutorial Part 4: Writing WINDBG Extensions
• Rico Mariani on Tracking down managed memory leaks (how to find a GC leak)
• An article by Dana Epp: Driver Debugging with WinDbg and VMWare

Update: The March 2005 edition of MSDN magazine has another article by John Robbins (see above): Mini Dump Snapshots and the New SOS