Charlie Calvert's Community Blog

The pre-beta, Visual Studio 2010 bits are now available for download. You can get them here: Main download  page . The VS 2010 download files page . The C# compiler team samples are also available for download here .

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...

The C# and VB teams, along with a few closely associated friends, are going to be on the road quite a bit during the next few months. Here I’ve posted at least a few of the major events we will be attending. If you happen to be in the area, try to drop...

Social bookmarking plays a big role in my online life. Sites like Delicious , DotNetKicks and Digg are places I often turn to for information or entertainment. These sites are important to me because I believe the community has a wisdom of its own that...

Matthew Manela, an engineer on our Online Tools team, has created and released a free, community-based tool called the Snippet Designer . His tool is a Visual Studio add-in that allows you to create and edit snippets from inside the IDE. Snippets are...

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...

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...

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...

We are continuing our series of posts about proposed features for the next version of Visual Studio. This post focuses on a new feature called Document Map Margins (DMM). Developers frequently work with huge source files that are difficult to navigate...

Microsoft has recently released an updated training kit with presentations, hands-on labs, demos and event materials describing features found in .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 . Here you will find over 100 MB of information with tips on using...

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...

No, I haven't totally lost my mind and gone completely marketing mad. This is a free add-in to Visual Studio 2008. Microsoft worked with Axialis to create this tool because there is a need for new, larger icons, now that we have higher resolution monitors...

In this 12 minute video I talk with C# IDE PM DJ Park about a new feature in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 beta called Live Semantic Errors or Squiggles. This feature gives an increased level of live feedback on potential errors that might be found...

Welcome to the 45th Community Convergence. I recently reached the two year mark here at Microsoft, and that means it is probably time for me to run some changes on my now familiar routines. In this post I'll begin that process by taking Community Convergence...

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...

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...

Here is a video on Channel 9 with the members of the C# design team. The discussion covers C# 4.0, dynamic languages, concurrency and declarative programming, Attendees include Anders Hejlsberg, Paul Vick, Scott Wiltamuth, Mads Torgersen, Matt Warren...

C++ PM Boris Jabes has added to our series of articles on features that are being considered for the next version of Visual Studio. In his post , Boris describes a proposed feature that will allow users to "find and navigate to a specific location in...

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...

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...

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...

It can be helpful to start from the beginning when working with new technologies. This post explains how to create a minimal WPF application that produces a single window with a gradient in it, as shown in Figure 1. The point of this exercise is to build...

I will be giving a talk at Tech Ed 2008, in Orlando Florida Title: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks Time: on Tuesday, June 3, at 10:30 AM. Location: S320A Talk Code: TLA321 Download Materials Related to he talk here . Description: Harness...

Developers with a bit of time on their hands have built some beautiful color schemes for the Visual Studio Editor. You can save download these settings files to your ...\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Settings directory. You can then access them by choosing...

Download the posters in PDF format here: Visual C# 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster Visual Basic 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster Visual C++ 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster Download the C# Keybindings in a spreadsheet. Note that many of the keybindings...