Pedram Rezaei has written a detailed and code centric article on how to create a LINQ provider similar to the LINQ to SQL provider. This article has large amount of specific technical information in it of interest to developers who want to tackle this complicated but very rewarding task. Building...

On the Tech Republic web site Justin James has written a review of Essential LINQ , the book Dinesh Kulkarni and I wrote about the key features of LINQ such as LINQ to Objects LINQ to SQL LINQ to XML We also touch on important subjects such as the Entity Framework, best practices, and LINQ extensions...

Here is a selection of videos created between July, 2008 and July, 2009 by members of the C# team at Microsoft: C# 4.0 Meet the Design Team : Anders Hejlsberg, Eric Lippert , et al Error Checking Feature in Visual Studio Service Pack 1 : DJ Park Inside C# 4.0 - Dynamic Typing, Optional Params, Variance...

Welcome to the 48th Community Convergence. The C# team continues to work hard to get out the next version of C#, and to add improvements to the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. Working long, fruitful hours on these rainy Washington State January days and nights, the engineers on our team are doing a great job...

The LINQ documentation created by Microsoft is available both inside Visual Studio, and for free via the MSDN library found on the WEB. Here are some important pages from that documentation that can help you navigate through the online reference material that Microsoft has prepared for LINQ developers...

This post covers the upcoming C# 4.0 support for covariance and contravariance when working with delegates and interfaces. Eric Lippert’s series of posts on this subject are definitely the definitive reference at this time. I’m writing this overview of the subject simply as an appendix to his explanation...

Welcome to the forty-sixth Community Convergence. There are three upcoming events for members of the C# team. The most important, PDC , will be held in Los Angeles over the week of October 26. The weekend before the conference, there will be a Code Camp in Los Angeles . One week after the PDC, there...

In a previous post , you saw how to work with line numbers when using LINQ to XML to read a file. This post continues in the same vein, but this time the focus is on how to: Read in an XML file with an arbitrary format, and then write it back out to disk in exactly the same format. Read in an XML file...

There are times when it is useful to know the line number of a node in an XML file. This information can be a helpful to users, particularly if you want to report an error. It can also be convenient to search for a node by line number, but that can, of course, be a very risky endeavor, as documents can...

I will be speaking this Friday and Saturday, August 22nd and 23rd, at devLink near Nashville, TN. I will give two talks, both on LINQ, both for intermediate and advanced developers. The first covers querying in LINQ, and the second talk explains the features of C# 3.0 that make LINQ possible. Essence...

Visual Studio Service Pack 1 and .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 are now available for download. A new feature for C# developers called squiggles provides better error messages while you are typing your code. There are several important LINQ performance enhancements, including one that could yield a 30% speed...

The LINQ aggregate operators allow you to perform simple math operations over the elements in a sequence. This post is designed to walk you through those operators, and give you an overview of how to use them. Table 1 shows a list of the 7 aggregate operators. Note : All the samples shown in this post...

This is a second post on the LINQ Set operators, the first being published while LINQ was still in beta. As mentioned in the previous post , there are four LINQ set operators: Union , Intersect , Distinct and Except . Like the other 49 LINQ operators, these methods are designed to allow you to query...

Lambdas are a simple technology with an intimidating name. They sound like they are going to be difficult to understand, but in practice prove to be relatively trivial. LINQ has an almost inordinate need for its users to declare a large number of small, simple delegates. The architects of C# decided...

There are a few scoping rules that you must keep in mind when using extensions methods. Problems with scoping and extensions methods are rare, but when you encounter them they are quite vexing. An instance method will always be called before an extension method. The runtime looks first for an instance...

When Microsoft employees talk about LINQ publicly, we haven't tended to emphasize how much time you can save by using it. This is perhaps because we don't want LINQ to be labeled as simply another RAD tool designed to save time. Nevertheless, it is becoming clear to me that shorter development cycles...

Rather than place the links to the most recent C# team content directly in Community Convergence , I have moved them here. This posts covers the last few weeks of posts from the C#, F# and related teams. From the C# Team Eric Lippert Method Hiding Apologia A Generic Constraint Question Reading Code Over...

I will be presenting on C# and LINQ three times in Southern California next week at a series of user group meetings. The events will be held in the San Diego and the Los Angeles area . Lisa Feigenbaum will be flying down from Redmond with me, and she will do VB presentations at the same set of meetings...

The IEnumerable<T> interface is a key part of LINQ to Objects and binds many of its different features together into a whole. This series of posts explains IEnumerable <T> and the role it plays in LINQ to Objects. If you hear people talking about IEnumerable <T>, and sometimes wished...

Welcome to the forty-third issue of Community Convergence. The last few weeks have been consumed by the 2008 MVP Summit . During that annual event about 150 C# MVP s and many MVP s from other disciplines descend on Redmond for a technical summit accompanied by fun and games at local restaurants and hotels...

The sample programs and the slides from my Essence of LINQ talk are available on the Code Gallery LINQ Farm resource page. The LINQ Farm Resource Page The Downloads section of the page Direct Link to the Download

I will be giving a talk entitled The Essence of LINQ in Seattle and Milwaukee over the coming week. Wisconsin .NET User Group Date : Saturday, April 5, 2008 Event : Deeper in .NET 2008 Location : Milwaukee Marriott West Seattle Netda User Group : Date : Monday, April 7, 2008 Event : Web Developer Meeting...

Welcome to the forty-second issue of Community Convergence. The last few weeks have found me working hard and late. We have had a successful internal C# community review, and that means I have been gathering statistics on all the projects we've been working on for the C# Community. I now have a deep...

It's a bit rainy and snowy today in Redmond. What an excellent time to curl up by the fire and watch a movie! Here are some suggestions. Videos by Anders Anders Hejlsberg, Herb Sutter, Erik Meijer, Brian Beckman: Software Composability and the Future of Languages Anders on LINQ and Functional Programming...

I mention the preview of their book that Jamie King and Bruce Eckel have made available as a free download on the MindView website in my latest Community Convergence post. However, I did not describe its contents, and so I thought I would take a moment to make sure that the community is aware of this...