Welcome to the thirty-seventh edition of Community Convergence. Visual Studio 2008 has been released into the wild, and the next version of Visual Studio is just starting to show the first stirrings of life. This is a time when a number of team members are on vacation, in transition to another team, or setting up machines in their new offices after joining the C# group. The PM's, development leads and various management types sit long hours in meetings while the plan the next version of the product. Even with all these diverse forms of activity, a number of team members have found time to post.  Veteran team member and C# expert Kevin Pilch-Bisson has even found time to revive his blog, sharing a number of great new posts with us.

From the C# Team

Kevin Pilch-Bisson

• Coding Styles: bools, structs, or enums?
• Dodfooding Challenges Part One
• Dodfooding Challenges Part Two: Unit Testing.
• VS Color schemes
• Enforcing Immutability in Code

DJ Park

• Public Hotfix: VS 2005 SP1 unresponsive when typing in an XML doc comment

Kirill Osenkov

• Jacob Carpenter on named arguments in C#
• Extension methods: one of my favorite C# 3.0 features
• DG 1.0 - free Dynamic Geometry Software for kids
• Please use File.ReadAllText and the like
• We need your feedback about Visual Studio setup

Luca Bolognese

• Creating an immutable value object in C# - Part I - Using a class
• Creating an immutable value object in C# - Part II - Making the class better

Sam Ng

• Virtual Events in C#

Visual C# QA Blog

• Is a tester ever done with testing (Part 2)

Eric Lippert

• Immutability in C# Part One: Kinds of Immutability
• Immutability in C# Part Two: A Simple Immutable Stack
• Immutability in C# Part Three: A Covariant Immutable Stack

Sreekar Choudhary

• Debugging C# 3.0 Part II

Charlie Calvert

• LINQ and Deferred Execution
• Connect to a SQL Database and Use the LINQ to SQL Designer

Other Microsoft Sources

Scott Guthrie

• .NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7)
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 4): Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios
• December 8th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, .NET, VS 2008
• VS 2008 Compatibility with Older VS 2005 Add-in Packages

Mitsu Furuta

• Prime number product using Linq

Wes Dyer

• Musings on Software Testing
• Volta: Redefining Web Development
• Volta and You

Other Links

Dan Wahlin

• New Features in VS 2008 and LinqDataSource

Wriju Ghosh

• LINQ to SQL : Enabling .dbml file for WCF
• C# 3.0 : Exploring Lambda Expression

Thomas Petricek

• Asynchronous Programming in C# using Iterators

Downloads

• DbLinq
• LINQExtender
• LINQ to Lucene