Community Convergence XXX

Welcome to the thirtieth Community Convergence. This edition has a wide range of articles on numerous topics and is not quite so narrowly focused on LINQ as most of the recent posts have been.

The C# team has some wonderful bloggers, and one of the best is Eric Lippert. In this Community Convergence, Eric posts about the C# language in general, and talks only infrequently about LINQ. At first I was disappointed to see this, but when I read the articles I was reminded of how well Eric writes. His posts are almost always engaging, frequently humorous and consistently instructive. If you don't already subscribe to his Fabulous Adventures in Coding blog, then you should at least consider doing so.

This trend away from writing about LINQ is also reflected in Jomo Fisher's blog. Jomo works on LINQ to SQL, and the fact that the team is wrapping up their Orcas work is reflected in his posts on other subjects, such as the always intriguing world of F# development. I'm the sentimental type, and so I find it sad that parts of Orcas are starting to shut down in anticipation of the product's release. Of course I and many others will focus even more heavily on LINQ to SQL as the product nears its launch, but some of the developers and testers on the C# team are beginning to raise their heads up from their LINQ work and look around them. Its the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

From the C# Team

Sreekar Choudhary

• Debugging and Delayed Execution in C#
• Extension Methods in C#

Eric Lippert

• Future Breaking Changes, Part I
• Future Breaking Changes, Part II
• Future Breaking Changes, Part III
• Avoiding the Pit of Despair: Why We Program in C# rather C++
• An Inheritance Puzzle, Part One
• An Inheritance Puzzle, Part Two
• When and where to put Using Directives
• Calling static methods on type variables is illegal, part three
• An Oldy but Goody: Eric Lambda Expressions and Anonymous Methods

Jomo Fisher

• Adventures in F#-Probing Type Inference
• Adventures in F#, the Lay of the Land
• Probing a Hidden .NET Runtime Performance Enhancement
• LINQ to SQL Trick: Get all Table Names
• Why Symmetric Multicore is a Dead End for PCs

Luca Bolognese

• Instead of a Simple Switch Statement
• Parsing Quicken Files

Luke Hoban

• Monadic Parser Combinators using C# 3.0 

Okay, I know it sounds like Luke is making that last one up, but to my surprise, I've found that C# programmers are actively using this technology! I guess that is why Luke is our Compiler PM: he knows all about the esoteric, cutting edge things that our great community developers like to explore.