Welcome to the eighth installment of Community Convergence. This week let's focus on two C# Wikis available on the web. The first is the MSDN Wiki, and the second is called C# Online.NET.

C# Online is a traditional Wiki designed to accumulate knowledge on C#. It uses the same tools as the Wikipedia, so it has a familiar, and very professional, appearance. You can browse the site as much as you want. To begin editing content, you must register.

The MSDN Wiki is a user driven extension to the documentation for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. All of the Visual Studio 2005 content is available on the MSDN Wiki. Users are able to append comments to the original content. For more information, read the FAQ, the team blog and this recent post by Rob Caron.

Examples of how the Wiki works are seen in this description of the conventions for capitalizing acronyms and in this entry on ignoring method results. As you can see, the top of the page has standard MSDN documentation, while the bottom half of the page has additional community content.

Microsoft C# Team Posts

  • Anson Horton has a new post in which he looks at the Set Next Statement portion of the Edit and Continue feature in Visual Studio. This is the technology that lets you move the instruction pointer when debugging your code. It allows you to hit a break point in a method, change your code on the fly, and then rerun the portion of your code that changed without having to restart the application.
  • Mads Torgersen has an intriguing post on LINQ, collections and collection initializers. Mads is the language PM in the C# group and has a deep understanding of this subject.
  • Scott Guthrie has a new post on Ajax. The Ajax beta is discussed below in the downloads section.
  • The test team is looking for developers. There are new listings on the jobs page.

C# on the Web

Downloads

  • Internet Explorer 7 has shipped and is available as a download. Here is the web site and the support number: 1-866-876-4926.
  • The C# team still needs your help debugging the new Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta. I've written about this subject elsewhere, so I will refer you to that post for the details. Several questions were cleared up in my blog's comments section. Scott Guthrie also has additional information in a post published on Oct 9.
  • Expression Beta
  • Visual Studio Power Toys
  • The ASP.NET team has a new Ajax download. Their code just hit Beta 1, and it is available to the public as a download. Scott Guthrie has blogged about this subject extensively.
  • Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office 2007 Beta (aka Cypress) is available for download. This gives you the tools you need to build Office 2007 applications. Details are available on the forums.
  • If you are running Vista, you might need the Windows Mobile. And here is the main page for this tool.

MSDN Articles of Note

Industry News

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