Welcome to the XVII Community Convergence. This post is dedicated to Steve Teixeira's Granddad, who died over the Christmas holidays. Steve and his Granddad were very close, and this loss has been hard on him.

Share a virtual lunch with Bill Gates, Scoble and various reporters. This video starts out with humdrum questions about games and movies. Just when it seems like the lunch will wind up quite modestly, the conversation turns to more challenging questions about multi-processor systems, networks, DRM, global warming and net neutrality.

I've been thinking this week about the impact that LINQ will have on the development world. If LINQ succeeds it will change the way we think about programming. The team's ambitions for LINQ are large. As the community PM for C#, my job is fairly obvious: I need to help us find a way to make LINQ succeed. Read more here.

What's Hot in C# World

  • Luca Bolognese has composed a post on an Excel add-in he wrote in C#. Luca is an avid reader, and in this post he pulls together knowledge attained from reading Ralph Vince.
  • Wes Dyer continues his amazing writing streak with two great new posts. The first describes the difficulty the C# compiler team has in generating good LINQ error messages.
  • Wes's second post tackles the difficult subject of understanding query expressions and the order in which their component parts are evaluated. This lead's Wes to look beneath the hood at the chain of query operators derived from the original query expression.
  • Threads and Blocking Queues.
  • Ahmed El Malt Friend Assemblies and on WCF.
  • Visual Studio Service Pack 1 install got you down? Check out Heath Stewart's post detailing why the install takes so long, and what is happening under the hood.
  • Scott Guthrie has some very important information about Service Pack 1 in his most recent post.
  • Part 8 of Scott Mitchell's continuing series on ASP.NET Membership, Roles and Profiles.
  • Working with the HashTable in C# 2.0
  • Scott Bellware on Behavior Driven Design, and a response to some comments he got on this BDD article.

Downloads

  • Test Driven.NET 2.0: Testing framework integrated with Visual Studio.
  • Go to the Zune Arts page and watch the Zune Cookie Video by SSSR. It's on an  Adobe flash page so I can't give you a direct link, but if you can get to the video its surprisingly good.