Charlie Calvert's Community Blog

Community Convergence XXXIII

Welcome to the thirty-third edition of Community Convergence. This week we have a new video called Programming in the Age of Concurrency featuring Anders Hejlsberg and parallel computing wunderkind Joe Duffy. In another context, Joe reminds us that there is a Parallel computing CTP planned for later in 2007. He recommends watching his blog if you want updates on this anticipated release. On a somewhat lighter note, there is also an amazing post from Luke Hoban, who has written a LINQ query that implements the Ray Tracing algorithm. See also the links to the ALT.NET controversy included in the "From the C# Community" section of this post.

Be sure to take the survey posted by the good folks from our documentation team. This is a great way for you to let us know what you think about the Microsoft documentation and related content that accompanies Visual Studio. You can find the survey here:

• VS Content and Documentation Survey:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=102169

From the C# Team

In this section I usually include only work created by members of the C# team. In this case, however, I have mixed in a few articles on concurrency not created by the C# team. I include them here because Anders, who is on our team, created a video on the Parallel Extensions for .NET (PFX), and I want to keep all the PFX content in one place.

• Parallel FX
  • Programming in the Age of Concurrency with Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy
  • Two MSDN Articles (Not from the C# team)
  • PLINQ is Coming up Soon (Not from the C# team)
• The Visual C# QA Team
  • The Visual C# QA Team Starts their Blog
  • Is a tester ever done with testing? (Part 1)
  • Rename Refactoring on Anonymous Types
• Luke Hoban
  • Taking LINQ to Objects to Extremes: A fully LINQified RayTracer
• Eric Lippert
  • Path Finding Using A* in C# 3.0, Part One
  • Path Finding Using A* in C# 3.0, Part Two
  • Path Finding Using A* in C# 3.0, Part Three
  • Path Finding Using A* in C# 3.0, Part Four
  • Packet GNomes
• Dinesh Kulkarni
  • Dinesh tracks the Elusive LINQ to SQL Bug
  • Attaching Detached objects in LINQ to SQL
  • LINQ to SQL Breaking Changes from Beta2 to RTM
  • LINQ to SQL: Features not in the Designer
• Matt Warren
  • Building an IQueryable Provider, Part VIII
• Jomo Fisher
  • Adventures in F#--Sweet Test-First Kung Fu
• Sreekar Choudhary
  • Extension methods Interoperability between languages

From the C# Community

These articles are written by other Microsoft employees, or by members of the C# community. Here I wade into deeper water by giving you some links to the interesting, and controversial, discussions surrounding the ALT.NET community.

• Deitel .NET 3.5 Resource Center
• ALT.NET
• Martin Fowler on Alt.Net
• Palermo: Scott Guthrie Announces ASP.NET MVC Framework
• Palermo: What is Alt.Net?
• Scott Guthrie on Extension Methods
• Rarely Used C#.NET Keywords
• Schwartzian Transforms using C# 3.0 and LINQ
  • Schwartzian Transform in C# 3.0
  • Another Schwartzian transform using LINQ queries

Downloads

• Utilities.NET 1.0 released
• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• Visual Studio 2005 SP1
• Virtual Earth Map Control SDK 4.0
• Windows Mobile Starter Kit: A sample application written in C# for Windows Mobile 6 Standard Devices
• XNA Quick Start Engine