Charlie Calvert's Community Blog

Community Convergence XXVIII

Welcome to the XXVIII Community Convergence. In these posts I try to wrap up events that have occurred recently in the C# community so that you can be sure to keep up with the latest news.

The What's New in C#  section contains the most amazing collection of blog posts I have ever been able to put together for one Community Convergence. Look below at the stellar entries from Eric Lippert, Matt Warren, Jomo Fisher, Luke Hoban, and others. Don't miss Luca's highly rated LINQ presentation at Tech Ed and Luke's Channel 9 video.

Dinesh Kulkarni, Anders Hejlsberg, Luca Bolognese, Kit George and others worked on a LINQ to SQL paper that gets mentioned from time to time. However, it can never be mentioned too often, as it is one of the key documents on LINQ. You can find it here: LINQ to SQL: .NET Language Integrated Query for Relational Data. Another canonical paper that is worth mentioning was just recently finalized. It's been a long road, but the ISO version of the C# 2.0 (Whidbey) language spec has been published, and is available for download.

What's New in C# 

• Dinesh Kulkarni is the C# PM in charge of LINQ to SQL. He has recently revved up his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/dinesh.kulkarni/. Here are a few of his recent posts:
  • Saved by SSEUtil (you should have it too if you are a SQL Express user)
  • LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Amazon, LINQ to Coffee Machine
  • LINQ is Pronounced Link, not Lin Cue
  • What? No recycling at one of the largest convention centers (Orlando)?
• Sreekar Choudhary is an SDE on the C# Team. This is his second post.
  • Debugging Features in C# 3.0 Part 1
• Browsing Eric Lippert's blog for the first time is a bit like finding a first class book on C#. Fortunately for us, he has many wonderful new posts to browse:
  • Calling static methods on type variables is illegal, part one
  • Calling static methods on type variables is illegal, part two
  • Bad Names
  • C# and VB Closures
  • Should We Produce Warnings for unused or un-initialized Internal Fields?
  • Why are overloaded operators always static in C#?
• Matt Warren is one of the top developers on the C# Team
  • The Blue Screen of Mort
  • LINQ to SQL: Ignorance is Bliss
  • LINQ to SQL: The Mapping Engine
  • Reddit Randomness and Wayward SPAM
  • Rotten to the Multi-Core
  • Agile at Microsoft
  • IQueryable's Deep, Dark Secret
  • The Origin of LINQ to SQL
• Jomo Fisher is C# developer on the LINQ to SQL team. Any technical posts he produce are mandatory reading in my book. He has three new posts for us:
  • Dealing with Linq’s Immutable Expression Trees
  • Leaky Functions, Barrel of Bugs
  • Evolution of a C# Query—Step by step from C# 1.1 to LINQ
• Luca Bolognese is C# Lead PM
  • ObjectSpaces early days ...
• Luke Hoban is the PM on the Compiler Team
  • C#3.0 Session at TechEd2007 - Code Samples
  • F12 - Go To Definition
  • The Channel 9 Video
• Wes Dyer
  • In Case You Haven't Heard
  • More on Partial Methods
• I have a few new posts:
  • Intro to LINQ to SQL on Orcas Beta 1
  • Important C# Videos
• How to be random with LINQ to Objects
• LINQ to the Semantic Web Additional information here and also on Hooked on LINQ.
• LINQ to Expressions  
• LINQ to Bits
• Work at Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2007/06/12/my-new-gig-as-a-sourcer.aspx

Community Web Sites and Downloads

• Hooked on LINQ
• Popfly
• Dan Fernandez on Beginning C#
  • Beginning Dev Center
  • Beginner's Center the Ad
  • Dan Fernandez on Facebook and Popfly