Community Convergence XXVI

The biggest news in the C# community is the official announcement of Silverlight at the MIX conference. Developers are most likely to want the Alpha release of this product, and also the beta of the Silverlight SDK. And of course, you want a link to the fancy Silverlight poster.

There were two important and related releases for C# users in the last couple of weeks. One was Visual Study Orcas Beta 1. The other was the pre-release of the .NET Framework 3.5. Both releases focus on LINQ, ASP.NET Ajax, increased support for WCF, and new classes for the base class library (BCL).

Don't miss the LINQ to Sharepoint references in the Downloads section!

C# Compiler Chat on Monday May 7

Members of the C# compiler team will be online to chat with the community about LINQ, Orcas Beta 1, the .NET 3.5 framework, and related matters. Time zones details are here, a link for your calendar is here and when the chat begins, you can enter the chat room here.

There will be a C# LINQ to SQL Chat on May 21 between 11 and noon Pacific time. LINQ to SQL provides fully type-checked native C# support for querying databases.  Time zones details for the chat are here, a link for your calendar is here, and you can enter the chat room here.

What's Hot in the C# Community?

• You can watch a video of Anders Hejlsberg's recent talk at MIX about LINQ, Orcas Beta 1 and Silverlight.  
• What do I need to build my first Silverlight App?
• C# Team Developer Jomo Fisher on the Visitor Pattern used with Expression Trees in LINQ. We're hoping we can put together an official sample on this subject, but for now, Jomo's post is an excellent way to start thinking about this tricky subject.
• Do you think you understand all there is to know about overriding virtual methods in C#? Yea, so did. At least until I read Eric Lippert's recent trivia posts. Test your knowledge of C# and see if you can answer Eric's question.
  • Eric's question
  • The answer
• Scott Guthrie on Write Only Variables Considered Harmful? 
• Kudzu (Chad Hower) on the new web deliverable lightweight .NET framework called Silverlight.
• On the OhmBlog Omri Gazitt offers an overview of the features of the .NET 3.5 framework from a WCF and Workflow perspective.
• Several months ago Jeff Beehler had an interesting post on working with the community. I include it because it gives an overview of part of my job.
• String matching in C#
• C++ Support for LINQ

Downloads

• Orcas Beta 1
• The .NET Framework 3.5 Beta
• Silverlight
• Silverlight SDK
• Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1
• Expression Blend 2 Beta (for Silverlight)
• Bart De Smet's amazing work on LINQ to Sharepoint and IQueryable:
  • LINQ to Sharepoint Project
  • LINQ to Sharepoint Available
  • The Return of IQueryable – Linq to Sharepoint
  • C# 3.0 Quiz – Core Linq Concepts
  • The IQueryable Tales, Introduction
• PHP for .NET: Phalanger update

Other Stuff

• Steve Teixeira, my long time good friend and the GPM  on the C++ team wrote a great post on progress bars.
• Here's a great article on why Microsoft does not ship Open Source software outside of CodePlex. It's a great commentary on our current economic system.