Community Convergence XXV

Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 is available for download. Though quite similar to the March CTP in terms of LINQ and C# language functionality, this download is more stable and has been more thoroughly tested. Other teams have had a chance to add more functionality, including a Team Foundation edition.

To accompany this release, we have a series of live chats planned. The first is the CSharp IDE Team Chat, which will occur on Monday, April 23 between 11 am and 12 pm Pacific time. If you live in another time zone, you can go here to sort out the time difference, and here to add a link to your calendar. This is your opportunity to ask the team questions about the C# IDE, and particularly about the features in Orcas Beta 1. When the chat begins, you can click this link to enter the chat room.

Other upcoming C# team chats include the following:

• A C# Compiler and Language Chat on May 7, between 11 and noon Pacific time will focus on LINQ. Time zones details are here, a link for your calendar is here and when the chat begins, you can enter the chat room here.
• A C# LINQ to SQL Chat on May 21 between 11 and noon Pacific time. LINQ to SQL provides  Time zones details are here, a link for your calendar is here, and you can enter the chat room here.

LINQ provides extensions to the .NET framework that make querying data a first class citizen of the C# language. In particular, LINQ to SQL is a component of LINQ which allows access to data stored in relational databases. You can also use LINQ to query XML or to query the collections in your code. More generally, LINQ provides a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. Since LINQ is part of the C# language, you will have full support for IntelliSense and compile time type checking.

Figure 1: In the downloads section, you can find links to Mitsu's post on WPF flip page development.

What's Hot from the C# Team

• Sreekar Choudhary, a developer on the C# team and a LINQ guru, has entered the blogging world. His first foray is a great post on LINQ and the Immutability of Anonymous types.
• On the frequent occasions when Eric Lippert finds time to blog, it is always worthwhile reading what he has to say. In the last few days he has been on tear:
  • Chained User Defined Conversions in C#: Part 1
  • Chained User Defined Conversions in C#: Part 2
  • Chained User Defined Conversions in C#: Part 3
  • Practice Thinking Like a Compiler Tester
• This is not a C# related post, but our talented Senor Program Manager Luca Bolognese has written an extraordinary essay on his thoughts about financial investments. You'll have to judge for yourself, but I've noticed that Luca always seems to have a few dollars in his pocket, so you might want to read this one carefully.

Downloads

• The obvious top entry in this category is Orcas Beta 1.
• Our extraordinary French compatriot, Mitsu Furuta, has written an intriguing post on WPF flip page controls. Mitsu points us to a downloadable version of this work.
• Aaron Erickson has made i40 available on CodePlex. He has also written a post introducing i40, which is short for Indexes for Objects. This technology enables indexes for LINQ to Objects in order to speed up searches.
• FileHelpers, a tool for importing and exporting fixed length or delimited records, has been updated.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2007
  You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2007
  Hello Charlie, I have been planning on writing an aritificial intelligence program for some time now and I think that C# together with LINQ will be just the thing I need. I will explain what kinds of things this involves and maybe you can do a tutorial on how these things might be done: It needs a database of English word-relations that I can download off the internet usually in txt form. I will have to convert this into a database. Then I can use LINQ to access this database. It can use LINQ statements to decide answers to questions such as "is a penguin a mammal?" and "can a dolphin fly?" Also, I will want the application to be able to display images (for example if the user asks: "Show me what a cat is" or something) then the application should be able to connect to Windows Live Search, for example, and download an image of a cat off the internet to display to the user. (This might involve passing HTML). It should be able to parse all sorts of databases and text files to add to its knowledge database. Ultimately the aim is to get it to read novels and have a general idea of who the main characters are, who did what to whom and where. It should have extra modules which it can decide (using the primary evaluation function) whether to use or not at any particular time. These would be plug-in modules such as a vision module. It will be able to rate the usefulness of these modules. To decide what to do next it should have a search tree function to evaluate several moves ahead - I would say this is the trickiest bit because it involves true intelligence. Plus as much as possible everything should be run as much as possible in parrallel to take advantage of future multi-core processing. Perhaps a speed advantage can be gained by loading the whole database into RAM memory first and then using LINQ on these in-memory objects? Anyway it is good to see that C# is going in the right direction to help make this kind of thing easier. Bye!

• Anonymous
  April 25, 2007
  Paulsta:  If you can find a copy of the May CTP still out there, check the samples.  There's a sample that can simulate a logical rules engine you might find interesting. Of course, the code might need porting to use on the latest bits.

• Anonymous
  April 25, 2007
  Paulsta: In fact, try this link -- I think it still works: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1e902c21-340c-4d13-9f04-70eb5e3dceea&displaylang=en

• Anonymous
  April 29, 2007
  that's exciting news, i am getting real sick of the vs2005 extensions for wpf.