Community Convergence XXXVI
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 the halls are deserted, as everyone is taking the day off. DJ, Alex and I are here, but most of the halls are deserted.
From our team's point of view, this release has been extremely orderly. Due to the rigors of an intense and carefully monitored schedule, most of our developers finished their work early, and many of them have been working on the next release of Visual Studio for over a month.
The C# team, which has charge of the compiler, the IDE and LINQ to SQL, has been, for good reason, very pleased with their work. One of my biggest problems this fall has been the difficulty I've had tracking down LINQ bugs. LINQ to Objects is a very solid piece of work, the LINQ IntelliSense has been performing beautifully, and LINQ to SQL works as advertised. I've been working with third parties throughout the summer and fall, pumping them for LINQ bugs, but they were hard to find. There are still lots of features to build into upcoming versions of the product, but the team has done an excellent job with what they have shipped to you today. They worked incredibly hard to make it happen, and now it is time to sit back and enjoy a hard earned rest.
Visual Studio 2008 Links
- MSDN subscribers can download it here.
- C# Express Edition is available here.
- Trial Versions are available here.
- C# 3.0 Language Specification
- VS 2008 ReadMe
- LINQ and language samples for Visual Studio 2008
- LINQ Hands On Labs
- LINQ to SQL Hands on Lab
- C# 3.0 Language Enhancements Hands On Lab
- LINQ to SQL Beta 2 to RTM Breaking Changes
- Visual Basic and C# Breaking Changes from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008
From the C# Team
Keith Farmer (LINQ to SQL)
Sam Ng
Karen Liu (IDE PM)
DJ Park (IDE PM)
Dinish Kulkarni (LINQ to SQL)
- LINQ to SQL Tips 1: how to map an enum
- LINQ to SQL Tips 2: how to use common base class for all entities
Kirill Osenkov (IDE)
Kathleen McGrath and Others in UE
Charlie Calvert
- Partial Methods
- Syntax Highlighted Code in Your Blog
- Types and Namespaces in .NET Framework 3.5
- Visual C# Team Picture: Fall, 2007
- Visual Studio 2008 Available for Download
From the F# Team
Luke is the Program Manager for the F# team and a very smart guy. If you are interested in F#, you will probably enjoy his overview of the language and the new project which he is developing.
Luke Hoban
Jomo Fisher
Other Microsoft Bloggers
Dan Fernandez
Scott Guthrie
- Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released
- ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1)
- Nov 17th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, VS 2008, .NET 3.5, IIS7, Silverlight
Beth Massi
Wriju Ghosh
- C# 3.0 : Evaluation of Lambda Expression to Language INtegrated Query (LINQ)
- LINQ to SQL : New method DataContext.GetCommand()
- LINQ to SQL: Working with hierarchical data
Hartmut Maennel
Downloads