There is a new October Orcas CTP available for download and there will be several upcoming live public chats with the C# team. The CTP became available on October 30. It is again packaged in a virtual machine, but available in several small downloads rather than two big downloads. There are no significant new LINQ bits in this build. The May CTP is still the best way to test LINQ.

Orcas and LINQ development has the full attention of nearly everyone on the C# team these days, and the halls are pulsing with energy and determination. Helping to focus everyone's efforts is Mike Hopcroft, who recently joined the C# team as the new Product Unit Manager (PUM).

Mike grew up in New York, where his father is a professor at Cornell. He got his start in the software business as a high school student, when he sold a few games to Atari. While attending Cornell, Mike reports that he "started a medical devices company that manufactured and sold hardware and software for detecting cataracts. After graduating I stayed on at Cornell to do an MS and PhD in computer vision."

Mike went on to work at Silicon Graphics, and then joined Microsoft in 1997. He helped run the team that created the InfoPath Designer, and went on to become the Dev Manager for WPF (Avalon.) He says he enjoys "enjoy hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, backpacking, flying, gadgets, and installing software."

LINQ News

Mike and our General Manager Scott Wiltamuth gathered the whole team together last Friday. The gave us a pep talk, an update on the Orcas schedule, and told of the great feedback on LINQ they have been getting from various movers and shakers.

I've also been getting positive reports about LINQ's reception from fellow C# PM's Luca Bolognese and Mads Torgersen.  Luca was giving talks in Sun City at Tech Ed Africa 2006. He reports that the "LINQ presentations were a huge success" and were on the short list to receive top honors at the conference. Mads said LINQ also generated attention at OOPSLA 2006 in Portland, OR. Hopefully we can coax him into telling us a little more about this experience sometime in the next few days.

LINQ Dev is sponsoring a LINQ Contest. The authors of the site are writing a LINQ book. To help jump start the text, they are promising three copies of the book to the winner of their contest. All entries will become the property of LINQ Dev, and fodder for the book. It sounds to me like a good way to foster some community interest in the text.

A little dust was kicked up last week during a discussion about the best place to host the main LINQ web site. You can now find it back near its original home on the .NET Framework web site. Please update your links.

C# Posts

• I've entered into the LINQ fray by writing an introduction to LINQ. This will be the first in a series of posts I craft on this important subject.
• Here is a new post on Lambda Expressions. This one comes all the way from Spain.
• I wrote a post on using snippets in Visual Studio. There are hundreds of useful snippets available for C# programmers. Many developers, especially those new to the language, will probably find it useful to stay on top of this subject. I hear that a utility to aid in this use of snippets is under development here at Microsoft and should be available within the next few months.
• Scott Guthrie has continued to post on life in the Ajax world. I'm all about LINQ these days, but Ajax is clearly an important technology.

Upcoming Events: Chat with the C# Team!

Mark your calendars! The C# team is planning several upcoming public chats.

• November 14, 2006, 1 PM Pacific Time: C# Language Chat. Want to know more about anonymous delegates in C# 2.0, or our design rationale for them? Have some questions about our current thinking on C# 3.0 and LINQ? Perhaps you'd like to share your ideas with other C# users or the C# language team. Join the C# team for all that and more!
• November 28, 2006, 1 PM Pacific Time: C# IDE Chat: Code snippets, enhanced intellisense, type colorization, refactoring, improved code navigation, metadata as source, Edit and Continue! There are so many great new C# IDE features in Visual Studio 2005 - there's a lot to talk about! Or perhaps you have a question about Visual Studio 2003 or what we're planning for the next version? It's your choice! Join the C# IDE team for a chat completely directed by your questions.
• December 12, 2006, 1 PM Pacific Time: The LINQ Project is a codename for a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. LINQ to SQL is a component of LINQ which allows access to data stored in relational databases. We’re actively designing and developing this technology - show up and join the LINQ to SQL team to participate in that process or just get a better understanding!

These Chats will frequently focus on LINQ. For more information, visit the LINQ web site or see this list of LINQ resources.

Trivia

• My fellow PM Karen Liu has been into -- well I'm not quite sure how to describe it. But you can go here to see how she's dealing with the pressure of the Orcas release.