DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by CharlieCalvert

Community Convergence LI

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:04:38 GMT

Welcome to the fifty-first edition of Community Convergence. In this post I'm simply going to highlight some of the great blogging activity produced by our team in recent weeks. Eric Lippert has been wonderfully productive. I'm beginning to wonder if we shouldn't simply dedicate an entire section of the Internet to his work. I've also included a few pointers to the work of our friends in the F# world; both Luke and Luca played major roles in the C# world for many years, and it is fun to track what they are doing with F#.

Community Convergence L

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:53:26 GMT

Welcome to the 50th issue of Community Convergence. Now that Visual Studio 2010 Beta is out, I think it might be helpful to draw attention to features from the C# team that appear in that release. The C# team defines the core syntax found in C# 4.0, and the IDE features that make it easy for developers to access those features. In this post, I'll focus on language features, in upcoming post, I'll focus on IDE features.

Community Convergence XLIX

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:47:05 GMT

Welcome to the 49th edition of Community Convergence. The big excitment of late has been the recent release of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta. If you have downloaded it yet, you should waste no time in heading over to the product page and downloading the files. As usual for betas of this type, I would recommend running it inside a Virtual Machine, or on a machine that you can afford to entirely reformat.

Silverlight Animation Part II: Sprites

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:52:13 GMT

In the previous post in this series, you learned how to create a simple animation with Silverlight. The next step is to learn how to create animated objects called sprites. This post will also explain how to ensure that their movement is restricted to a bounded area, as shown below in Application 1. Logic like this can be used in simple games, or in programs that want to use animation to capture or focus the user's attention.

Silverlight Layouts Part 1

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:37:40 GMT

This is the third part in a series of posts on Silverlight. In this post covers creating an interface for a Silverlight application. It explores simple ways to work with Grid controls, and how to create Rows and Columns inside them.

Silverlight Simple Animation

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:48:33 GMT

This post is one of series on Silverlight. In this article the focus is on a technique that uses a timer to produce simple animations. I will follow this post with at least one additional article on Silverlight animation.

Creating a New Silverlight Project in Visual Studio 2008

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:24:01 GMT

This post is part of a series of articles on Silverlight. The purpose of this post is describe how to start a new Silverlight project or how to add a new or existing Silverlight project to an existing ASP.NET Web Application.

Publishing an ASP.NET Web Application in IIS

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:13:09 GMT

I had a need to publish a Web Application from Visual Studio 2008 into IIS, rather than into the default Visual Studio Development Server. I already had IIS installed, but I wasn't quite sure what to do next. Here are some notes that I took on what turned out to be a three step process to publish an ASP.NET Web Application to my IIS Web Server

Silverlight Revisted

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:38:49 GMT

Charlie Calvert talks about some of the basics of Silverlight development.

Essential LINQ Published

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:01:02 GMT

There was a knock on my door this morning. By the time I could make it to the front of the house, the delivery man was gone, but he had left behind a box full red and white books, each with the title Essential LINQ. On the cover was my name, and the name of my good friend Dinesh Kulkarni. This was, of course, a box full of the first copies of my most recent book. They had a arrived at my house on a most propitious date: the first day of spring.

Create custom LINQ providers fluently

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:01:02 GMT

Just released LinqExtender 2.0. Over previous release , it contains generally bugs fixes. Overall, I have focused on striping out complexity as much as possible to keep you focused on your business logic. You can see the full list of features in the documentation that comes with it.

Community Convergence XLVIII

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:21:58 GMT

Welcome to the 48th Community Convergence. The C# team continues to work hard to get out the next version of C#, and to add improvements to the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. Working long, fruitful hours on these rainy Washington State January days and nights, the engineers on our team are doing a great job putting together a set of features that will improve both C#, and the experience C# developers have in the Visual Studio IDE. They are also working to lay the foundation for some big improvements which you will see only after the next version of C# ships.

10-4 Episode 1: Working with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:23:05 GMT

A new series of videos on the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP has been launched. The first episode covers installing and running the CTP, which comes in the form of a VPC.

Dynamic in C# Part VI: What Dynamic Does not Do

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:08:30 GMT

C# Engineer Sam Ng describes "What Dynamic Does not Do" in this sixth post in his excellent series on new features in C# 4.0

Query Data with Parallel LINQ

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:18:56 GMT

The code shown in this post uses a pre-release version of PLINQ called the Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5. When PLINQ finally ships, it will run only on .NET 4.0 or later. The version I'm using that runs on top of 3.5 is for evaluation purposes only. There will never be a shipping version that runs on .NET 3.5.

Jeff Richter Video on Asynchronous Programming and his Power Threading

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:27:37 GMT

I recently had the chance to sit down with Jeff Richter and discuss his Power Threading Library. This library provides a simple technique for handling asynchronous development. By making clever use of C# Iterators, Jeff is able to make asynchronous code looks as though it is synchronous code the executes in a linear fashion. This greatly simplifies the asynchronous programming model, making it easy for you to complete tasks that were formerly considered difficult.

LINQ Reference Documentation

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:42:06 GMT

The LINQ documentation created by Microsoft is available both inside Visual Studio, and for free via the MSDN library found on the WEB. Here are some important pages from that documentation that can help you navigate through the online reference material that Microsoft has prepared for LINQ developers. I would not suggest using these references materials as a primary means of learning LINQ. However, if you have a book or other guide to LINQ development, then this reference material can be a useful addendum to that text. If you understand in a general way how LINQ works, but need answers to detailed questions, the links provided here may sometimes help you find answers to your questions.

Anders Hejlsberg Video on C# Dynamic

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:46:02 GMT

In this Channel 9 video C# architect Anders Hejlsberg answers some commonly asked questions about the new Dynamic features that will be included in C# 4.0. Building on the talk that he gave at PDC, Anders chats with C# Community PM Charlie Calvert. They discuss questions that community members have asked and riff on themes of import to developers who have been following the latest news from the C# team.

XNA Game Studio 3.0

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:01:20 GMT

The good folks who put together our gaming tools have released XNA Game Studio 3.0.

New Features in C# 4.0 Paper, plus Feedback and Samples

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:31:15 GMT

Mads Torgersen, a C# PM and member of the C# design team, has worked with other members of the C# team to create a document that outlines the new features in C# 4.0. Along with Anders' PDC talk, this is probably the best way to get an overview of what the C# team has planned for the next release of the language. I also want to make sure you know about the C# 4.0 samples. These short projects are designed to demonstrate how to use the new language features in C# 4.0. Finally, I provide a link to the Visual Studio 2010 CTP forums based feedback area, where you can comment on the new features Microsoft has planned for the C# language and the VS IDE. These forums provide a place where you can provide the PM's who are driving the new features in VS 2010 with your valued feedback.

Community Convergence XLVII

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:46:36 GMT

Welcome to the 47th Community Convergence. We had a very successful trip to PDC this year. In this post I'll outline some of the highlights, and give you a chance to share in some of the excitement by linking to online versions of the talks from the C#, VB, IronRuby, IronPython and F# teams. Speakers at these talks include Anders Hejlsberg, Luca Bolognese, Paul Vick, Lucian Wischik, Dustin Campbell and Alex Turner. Several of these talks were among the top rated events at the conference, with Anders' talk once again garnering the most attention and generating the most excitement.

LINQ To SQL is Dead - Read Between the Lines

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:46:13 GMT

David Hayden with some great points on the Linq to SQL announcement and some ideas on how the project could be saved.

Coderush-Xpress for C#

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:54:53 GMT

Developer Express and Microsoft have arranged a free copy of limited features from CodeRush and Refactor! Pro that is available for C# developers using Visual Studio 2008.

LINQ Farm: Covariance and Contravariance in C# 4.0

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:31:02 GMT

This post is designed to help you begin to understand a new feature in the next version of Visual Studio that involves covariant and contravariant support for 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, and as quick reference for folks who want to get up to speed on this technology.

Visual Studio 2010 Pre-Beta CTP is Now Live

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:29:09 GMT

The pre-beta, Visual Studio 2010 bits are now available for download.