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Community Convergence VII

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The C# team needs your help debugging the new Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta. I've written about this subject elsewhere, so I will refer you to that post for the details. Several questions were cleared up in my blog's comments section. Scott Guthrie also has additional information in a post published on Oct 9.

Chapter 11 from Mark Michaelis's book Essential C# is available for download in PDF format.

Simon Muzio has published a list of upcoming Live from Redmond talks. A lot of the talks are on Ajax and ASP.NET, but if you dig deeply enough, you will also find talks on the ListView control, team development, Orcas, smart clients, and Visual Studio. If you haven't been watching these, you should make time in your schedule. The already completed talks can be viewed online.

Those who are interested in language theory might enjoy Joel Spolsky recent review of Beyond Java. Joel never mentions C#. Nevertheless, he makes an interesting argument for the new var identifier that will be part of C# 3.0. For instance, he says that "the inability to express data in Java code is mostly just a side effect of the requirement that types be declared explicitly." The new var identifier allows C# programmers to avoid explicit typing, so it follows the paradigm Joel advocates in his review.

C# Blogs

Mads Torgersen has an intriguing new post on LINQ, collections and collection initializers. Mads is the language PM in the C# group and has a deep understanding of this subject.

Two good new posts by Jani Järvinen appeared in the C# Frequently Asked Questions blog. One is entitled How Do I Calculate a MD5 Hash from a String? The other is entitled How Do I Send Out Simple Debug Messages to Help with My Debugging?

Microsoft Blogs

Chuck Jazdzewski (aka as ChuckJ) has been publishing articles on XAML. The most recent is XAML Part VII: Fun with Markup Compatibility. Another recent technical blog by ChuckJ discusses recursion in generic linked lists.

ChuckJ also has a great blog entitled Fatherly Advice to New Programmers. When he was at Borland, Chuck was a much loved character who inspired intense loyalty from his team. I'm sure the developers on the Cider  project here at Microsoft feel the same way about him. This article helps show why people like to work with Chuck. 

Steve Teixeira has a good post about Microsoft, passion, and developer tools. Of less immediate interest to those of us in C# land is his ongoing discussion about the future of C++.

Industry News

Veteran Delphi guru Marco Cantu pulls together a lot of the controversial blogs and threads from the Delphi world. This is one stop shopping for those who want to get up to speed on the Borland DevCo deal and all the debate surrounding it. I still love Delphi and I think Nick Hodges is doing a great job for the company. We are all looking forward to the day they break free of the Borland shackles. In the meantime, John Kaster has a great announcement about the Turbo Professional command line compilers.

On Monday, Sun’s computational theologist Gilad Bracha resigned his post as distinguished engineer. As official keeper of the Java Language Specification (JLS) Bracha has pulled many of the improvements to the language and platform, including generics and the upcoming improved support for dynamic languages. He’ll be sorely missed as one of the main drivers of change in the Java world.

PC World says that Intel will release its quad core chip on November 13. This chip will paste together two dual core chips into a single chip. AMD will release a similar chip in 2007, only their offering is not an amalgamation of two old chips, but rather is designed from the bottom up to support 4 cores. We won't know until both chips are out and the tests are in if the AMD design is actually better than the Intel design.

Wired reports that the email client Eudora has been released as open source. Those who have been around for awhile know that Eudora was once nearly ubiquitous, and that it still has a large following. Eudora has released a FAQ about their new move to open source. They state that the product will be become part of the Mozilla Thunderbird family. I still use Thunderbird for reading news groups. It's one of the few holdovers from my mass migration to Microsoft technology.

Community Convergence posts appear first in my blog, and then shortly thereafter on the front page of the C# Developer Center. If you are reading this on the front page of the developer center, you can use my blog to enter comments on this post.

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