Mike Snell

Mike Snell

Mike has over 12 years of experience writing and designing software. His broad range of experience covers creating enterprise-level, Web-based systems as well as commercial applications using the Microsoft platform.

Articles Authored

  • The Enterprise Instrumentation Framework

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - November/December

    In "The Enterprise Instrumentation Framework," Mike Snell presents EIF as a powerful yet simple solution for embedding diagnostic instrumentation into production applications. EIF provides a unified, minimalistic API that enables developers to generate rich, configurable trace data across multiple event stores with ease. By supporting request-based event tracing and distributed environments, EIF allows administrators to troubleshoot issues efficiently without burdening developers. Snell emphasizes that EIF overcomes common barriers to instrumentation, helping maintain application health and accelerating problem resolution while minimizing code complexity and performance impact.

  • GDI+ Drawing Page, Part 1

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - May/June

    There was a time, not too long ago, when browser-based user interfaces were considered both the status quo and the Next Great Thing.The demand for Windows Forms-based applications started to dwindle as the developer community fully embraced browser/server applications with their centralized server components and ubiquitous user interfaces. .NET, however, brings a much more powerful library of distributed communication technologies (such as Web services and remoting). As a result, .NET developers are seeing some of these traditionally browser-based applications becoming, more simply, Web-enabled and less tied to a browser. In short, developers can now see a very real business case for building distributed applications on Windows Forms technology.

  • Reflection Part 2: Emit

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - January/February

    Mike Snell explains Reflection.Emit, a facet of the .NET System.Reflection namespace that lets developers generate new assemblies, modules, types, and MSIL code at run time. The article walks through the practical steps—creating a dynamic assembly, defining a module and type, adding a method, and emitting MSIL with ILGenerator—to build a class and a ReturnSum method without producing high-level source code. Snell then highlights scenarios for runtime code generation and optimization, and shows how dynamic invocation can complement emission. The piece situates Reflection.Emit as a powerful, targeted tool for specialized, performance‑sensitive solutions.

  • Reflection Part 1: Discovery and Execution

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - November/December

    In this first article of a two-part series, Mike Snell demystifies .NET reflection by explaining how assemblies self-describe via metadata and showing practical techniques to load assemblies, inspect types and members, filter and search with BindingFlags or custom delegates, and instantiate and invoke discovered types and methods at runtime; he demonstrates these concepts with code (including a simple type browser) and positions reflection as a powerful albeit specialized tool, with Reflection.Emit to be covered in Part 2.

  • ASP.NET Caching Strategies

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - May/June

    ASP.NET provides developers with the ability to cache dynamically generated pages.This means that it is now possible to cache pages built on posted data and querystrings! For instance, an e-commerce site that generates the same catalog from the database over and over on nearly every user request can now simply cache the catalog pages. Caching saves precious database server CPU cycles and renders pages down to the client much faster. Of course, when the catalog data is updated, the cache can simply refresh itself. Furthermore, developers can define the length of time an item is to be cached, indicate cache dependencies, create cached versions per browser, and indicate where an item should be cached (client, server, proxy, etc.).

  • Top 10 .NET Framework Classes

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - March/April

    Microsoft .NET brings many important advances to the software engineering world.We believe that Windows developers everywhere have reason to celebrate the arrival of .NET, but Visual Basic developers should be the most ecstatic. We get true inheritance, structured exception handling, and a state-of-the-art IDE?but, perhaps the coolest thing .NET provides us as VB developers is the Framework Class Library (FCL). To commemorate the release of .NET, we thought we would present what we consider to be the top ten most useful, utterly awesome (and coolest) classes bundled inside the .NET FCL.