.Net Smoothie

I’ve been very quiet recently. (I’m trying to not be so loud, Scott. ) You see, I’ve been writing a lot of ASP.Net code for a site I’m working on. And, to be honest, I’ve been having a lot of trouble. The source code for .Net has been very helpful, and I’ve learnt a […]

.Net 3.5 had some nice tricks in it. LINQ-to-XML was one of them. With the new "X"-types, you can make working with XML really easy.
VB.Net 9 takes it one step further, and lets you write XML in your code without strings.
"Hey Rich, that’s old news," I hear you say. "And who’s interested in VB […]

Have you wondered if and when you should use the new LINQ features in .Net 3.5?
Like, where should I put a new extension method? Should I use Func<T> or a custom delegate? How do I best implement a mix-in (extension methods on an interface)?
Well, Mircea Trofin has just published a new draft of some LINQ […]

I love this! Not because of the features, but because of the way it works.
Tim Sneath just blogged about TextGlow - an online Word docx file reader. The docx format is XML, and Silverlight 2 apps can use LINQ-to-XML to parse it and format it for display inside the browser.
Amazing!
You can read more about […]

Mix 08 seems to be much more mature than ever before. In previous years there were a lot of ideas being spoken about; this year there are much more implementations of those ideas available to look at. It seems like a lot of people have been working on the new technologies over the past year […]

My favorite conference is about to start: MIX 08.
It’s a great conference for Microsoft developers with an interest in the web. Last year they had some great talks about user experience and architecture. There’s always something interesting to learn.
Unfortunately I can’t be there (as usual), but all the sessions will be online. Tim Sneath […]

While surfing around tonight, I came across ExtensionMethod.net, a database of useful Extension Methods for C# 3.0 and VB 9. I thought it might be useful, so I added a few of my own extension methods.

IComparable<T>.LessThan
int.Times
int.To

There aren’t many there yet, but there are one or two on there from Scott Guthrie.
Have you got any […]

I just read a fantastic quote about LINQ from the book Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 by Joseph C. Rattz, Jr.:
I prefer to think of LINQ as a data iteration engine, but perhaps Microsoft didn’t want a technology named DIE.

I think they already built the technology for such a product, and […]

Visual Studio 2008 has lots of goodies in it, like LINQ syntax, CSS editing, and testing tools. There’s a lesser-known feature which I really appreciate though - the “Remove and Sort Usings” command in the C# editor.
You activate the command by placing your cursor over the using statements and clicking on the right mouse-button.

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I was recently reading Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition, and came across this piece of example Ruby code:
[1,3,5,7].inject(0) {|sum, element| sum+element} -> 16 [1,3,5,7].inject(1) {|product, element| product*element} -> 105

Inject is a method which acts on an array by aggregating or accumulating the values within that array. It […]