Welcome to the forty-fourth Community Convergence. I want to remind every one that the C#, VB and dynamic language teams are still hiring. If you are an expert manager, developer or test engineer, please look at our listings and see if there is a place where you might belong. This is an excellent opportunity to participate in a first rate development process and to meet and work with some of the best developers in the world.

Tech Ed 2008 is fast approaching. This year it will be held in Orlando, Florida and divided into two sections. The Developer sessions will be held June 3-6, and the IT Professionals will gather June 10-13. Bill Gates will give the keynote at the developer conference, and there will be 16 tracks for you to explore. Several C# team members will be giving talks, as explained below.

I'm sure everyone knows that the betas for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 have been released. Please download these bits and gives us feedback outlining how you think they look. Here are are posts by Brad Abrams and Scott Guthrie that can help get you up speed on these new bits, and here is the download for the betas.

Other news includes Keith Farmer's departure from Microsoft. Keith is a developer, but he has been a hard working and steady contributor to the community. He has been very active on the forums, in his blog, and across the net. We will miss him.

Finally, I'm going to try changing the format of Community Convergence for several reasons. First, the MSDN team has asked me to shorten these posts to fit in better with their new look and feel for the site. Secondly, we've had great success with our Visual C# Team and Community Blogs section, and feel that some of my listings are also appearing there. Thirdly, it is simply time for a change, and this will force me to try to become a bit more creative with my use of this space. As a result, I will try, as an experiment, moving the team links to a separate page, and use this space for important announcements, team gossip, and highlighting news.

See the most recent C# Team and Community Blog Links.

Tech Ed 2008 Talks by the C# Team

• Meet the Microsoft Visual C# Team
  • Speakers: Charlie Calvert, Mads Torgersen, Alex Turner, Karen Liu, Eric Maino, others....
  • 6/5/2008 4:30PM-5:45PM (Blue Theater 2)
  • Join members of the Visual C# team as we discuss Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and our plans for the next release of Visual Studio. This is a good opportunity to get to know team members, to ask questions, give suggestions, and ask for guidance. Come prepared to chat, to listen, to ask questions, and to laugh.
• How LINQ Works: A Deep Dive into the Implementation of LINQ
  • Speaker: Alex Turner
  • Level: 400 - Expert
  • Friday, June 6 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM, S320 A
  • Want to know what really happens when you execute your favorite LINQ queries? Curious how the same query expression can target either in-memory data or relational data? In this 400-level talk, Alex Turner, the C# Compiler Program Manager, uses Reflector and other tools to reveal exactly how the compiler translates LINQ query expressions. Gain a deeper understanding of LINQ’s functional roots as we see how lambda expressions and iterator methods enable LINQ to Objects' elegant syntax. Then find out what's the same and what's radically different as we explore LINQ to SQL and the expression trees that make it tick.
• Best Practices with the Microsoft Visual C# 3.0 Language Features (Repeats on 6/6)
  • Speaker: Mads Torgersen
  • Tuesday, June 3 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM, S320 E
  • Friday, June 6 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM, S330 A 
  • Visual C# 3.0 introduces a number of new language features such as query expressions, lambda expressions, extension methods, automatically implemented properties, local type inference and more. These are all features that can really improve the quality of your code. They also give you new ways of doing things wrong. This talk focuses on both the good and the bad: how to use and how not to use the new features of C#. Each feature is introduced with a small example, and you should be able to follow the talk even if you are not already familiar with the new language constructs.
• Microsoft Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks
  • Speaker: Karen Liu
  • Thursday, June 5 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, S220 E
  • In this demo-focused session, we look at a number of ways to make you more productive in the Visual C# IDE as you move through the development lifecycle—whether you're trying to come up to speed with an unfamiliar code base, performing a refactoring to help keep your code clean, writing in new pieces of business logic, or debugging through a problem. These are the tips from the C# team itself—features from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and out-of-box solutions that we use and love telling people about for making tasks easier.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks (Repeats on 6/6)
  • Speaker: Charlie Calvert (repeat by Sara Ford)
  • Tuesday, 6/3/2008 10:30AM-11:45AM (S320 A) - Charlie
  • Friday, June 6 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM, S230 C - Sara
  • Harness the power of the 2008 IDE using new tips and tricks used by top Microsoft MVP developers and Microsoft employees. We look at new keyboard shortcuts, new options, the powerful "Quick Command" system, macros, tweaking IDE performance, and more that will make any developer using Visual Studio instantly more productive. The entire session is hands-on inside the IDE and applicable to any language, including Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual C#, and Visual C++. If you've been using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or have never touched Visual Studio, you're guaranteed to walk away a VS power user.