Karen Liu, the Lead Program Manager for the Visual C# and Visual Basic IDEs, has created a new video on Generate from Usage (GFU), a feature found in Visual Studio 2010, Beta 2. This post recaps what is included in the video, including the sections that show how GFU can be used to enhance test first...

I’ve written about Silverlight in previous posts published on this blog. Recently, however, I’ve found my thoughts coming back to this subject. This is hardly unusual: many people are interested in Silverlight. The reason for the attraction to this technology is not hard to discover. Silverlight allows...

This post shows a simple way to write code that takes advantage of multiple processors. You will see that LINQ queries can allow you to side step the difficult tasks normally involved in writing multi-threaded code. To get started, all you need is a little basic knowledge of how to write simple LINQ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

The Visual Studio 2008 CSharp samples include several valuable tools that LINQ developers can use to help expedite the development process. One of the is the Expression Tree Visualizer. This tool works in both Visual Studio Express and the other versions of Visual Studio that support C# development....

LINQ Farm Seeds are short posts designed to be read in a few minutes. In the previous seed we used the first overload of the C# 3.0 LINQ Aggregate operator to sum a list of numbers. In this post we'll work with a list of words. The code we will look at reverses the following string: The end is the beginning...

LINQ Farm Seeds are short posts designed to be read in a few minutes. The first seed showed how to list in alphabetical order all the operators used in LINQ to Objects. At the top of the list one found the Aggregate operator. The LINQ Aggregation operator is easy to use. Consider the following declaration...

When discussing the design of a technical web site, I usually advocate finding ways to improve the community's ability to rate content, comment on articles, tag articles and dynamically search for articles. I advocate creating a dynamic web site because I don't believe it is possible to create an easily...

LINQ Farm Seeds are short posts, designed to be read in a few minutes. This one covers enumerating the operators used in LINQ to Objects. The source code for this project is available in the LINQ Farm on Code Gallery. The LINQ to Objects operators are implemented as extension methods on the Enumerator...

Newcomers to LINQ often find expression trees difficult to grasp. In this post I hope to show that the subject is not quite as difficult as it might appear at first. Any reader who has an intermediate level understanding of LINQ should find the material in this post easy to grasp. An expression tree...