Charlie Calvert's Community Blog

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...

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...

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...

Welcome to the fortieth issue of Community Convergence. This week we have two new releases of note: We have created a new regular post called Future Focus that is designed to keep the community aware of the C# Team's long term plans for the language....

Code Gallery, a new site for sharing samples from Microsoft and the Community is now live: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ . Soma has posted about this site, and the C# Developer Center is tracking a list of popular releases on its front page in the section...

Just a reminder to community members in the Seattle area that there will be a free Code Camp here this weekend put on by members of the local community. This is a great chance for you to learn about the latest technologies in Visual Studio 2008 and other...

by Charlie Calvert and Mads Torgersen What is Future Focus? This is the first of a series of monthly posts designed to give insight into the C# team’s current plans for future versions of Visual Studio. Each post will highlight one or more key subjects...

Andrew Nichols at Microsoft Research asked me to post the following for him. It is request for developers local to the Seattle area to help with testing our products. This seems like a good opportunity for the community, so here is his message: Microsoft...

Welcome to the XXXIX issue of Community Convergence. The big news this week is that Microsoft has begun releasing source code for the .NET Framework libraries. Shawn Burke explains how to configure Visual Studio so that you can step into the source. The...

Microsoft ISV’s, partners and developers in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region will want to visit a new web site that provides pointers to a wide selection of relevant programs, events, training sessions, communities, blogs and downloads. This technical...

Over the holidays Alex Turner, Mary Deyo and I added a new sample to the downloadable version of the CSharp samples that accompany Visual Studio 2008. This sample is called the LinqToTerraServerProvider , and it appears in a sub-directory called WebServiceLinqProvider...

Welcome to the thirty-eighth Community Convergence. These posts are designed to keep you in touch with the activities of the C# team. We have a new blogger. Ed Maurer is the Compiler Dev Lead for the C# team. He's going to be blogging about the compiler...

Here is a video version of the Deferred Execution post I published on December 9. You can watch the video on SoapBox , or you can access it directly from the Microsoft Downloads site . To download the video, just right click on this link and choose Save...

In an earlier post I showed how LINQ developers can connect to a database and write a simple query. This post steps behind the scenes of a LINQ to SQL application and describes the classes auto-generated by the Object Relational Designer (aka LINQ to...

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...

This post covers one of the most important and frequently misunderstood LINQ features. Understanding deferred execution is a rite of passage that LINQ developers must undergo before they can hope to harness the full power of this technology. The contents...

Inhabitants of the artificial online world Second Life can go to the Microsoft Visual Studio Island on Saturday, December 8 for a special event. Visitors who attend the event will get an opportunity to learn about C#. The folks who set up C# Day write...

Welcome to the thirty-sixth issue of Community Convergence. This is the big day, with Visual Studio 2008 launched into the world ! I wish I could tell you that everyone was walking up and down the hallways cheering today, but that was last week. Today...

Visual Studio ships with a tool called Xsd.exe that will automatically generate XSD based on an XML file. To use Xsd.exe, you will need to open up a Visual Studio command prompt. Click “Start,” point to “All Programs,” point to “Microsoft Visual Studio...

The Parallel Computing Platform team has launched the Parallel Computing dev center along with their first Community Technology Preview. A CTP gives you a chance to try a new technology before it is released. The new parallel computing Dev Center will...

This event has been canceled! I will not be in San Jose on the morning of Monday, December 10 for a free Visual Studio 2008 Celebration put on by Microsoft and Falafel Software . Other speakers at the event will include Lino Tadros of Falafel, and Todd...

Microsoft Pays Visual Studio 'Debt' Microsoft Releases Visual Studio 2008 Microsoft ships Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5 released Microsoft ships Visual Studio 2008

To begin working with LINQ to SQL in Visual Studio 2008 you will need a database that you can query and a copy of MS SQL Server or SQL Express. In this post, I'm going to focus on SQL Express since it is free and since it gets installed by default when...

Visual Studio 2008 is now available for download! MSDN subscribers can download it here . C# Express Edition is available here . Trial Versions are available here . C# 3.0 Spec, VS 2008 ReadMe, Samples, Hands on Labs, Breaking Changes The C# 3.0 specification...

Microsoft has released a PDF version of a new poster , showing the .NET Framework 3.5 commonly used types. The amount of LINQ specific data here is rather limited, and a bit spread out across the poster, rather than centralized in one place: System.Data...