Welcome to the Thirty-Fourth issue of Community Convergence. This is a time when the team is in transition. We are wrapping up the work on Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) and getting ready to move on to the next phase. This means some of our old favorites...

Members of the C# Team had a "Day of Caring" during which we worked for Habitat for Humanity building homes. HFH describes their mission as follows: "[We seek] to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world, and to make decent shelter a...

I use one of the Beta 2 VPC's regularly, and so I was interested to learn that it will expire prematurely on November 1, 2007. This is not Orcas itself that will expire, but the entire OS. If you have any projects or data that you are keeping on one of...

The Open Source Initiative has approved two of Microsoft's licenses . This is important because it gives them legitimacy in the open source community. The licenses were formally known as the Microsoft Permissive License and the Microsoft Community License...

I often get questions about whether one should use Windows Forms or WPF in particular circumstances. As a result, I was interested to find this article from David Chappell. Here is my unofficial summary of what David says about when to use WPF: David...

Welcome to the thirty-third edition of Community Convergence. This week we have a new video called Programming in the Age of Concurrency featuring Anders Hejlsberg and parallel computing wunderkind Joe Duffy. In another context, Joe reminds us that there...

Kathleen McGrath and the folks who create the documentation for Visual Studio are running a survey to get feedback from users. Here is your chance to comment on the various types of online documentation provided by Visual Studio. Several different types...

Here is a piece of wonderful news: Scott Guthrie has announced today that we will be releasing the source code to the .NET framework when we ship Visual Studio 2008 later this year! An option will be made available to allow you to step directly into the...