The second part of our C# 3.0 series is here, covering extension methods and lambda expressions. Learn:

• What an extension method is
• How to write extension methods
• The new lambda expression syntax
• To use the higher order programming paradigm

Go to the article!

This week we are starting a brand new four part series, covering the new features of C# 3.0! The first article of the series covers type inference. You'll learn:

• What is type inference anyway?
• How can you take advantage of it?
• What does the new "var" keyword do?
• Is this at all related to Variant types in Visual Basic?
• Will using this hurt the performance of your programs at runtime?

Check out the article!

The Microsoft Visual Studio .Net development team have released Visual Studio 2008 to manufacturing. That means it will be in our hands Real Soon Now. For those of us who have been eagerly awaiting the advances made in this new version of Visual Studio .Net, this is exciting news.

First of all, there are significant language updates. Both C# and VB.NET have new language features that will increase developer performance, allow more opportunities for abstraction and code re-use and help us to write more readable code.

Linq is one of the big new features. It integrates a query language into C# and Visual Basic, allowing for writing of declarative, SQL-like queries directly into programs. These can be type-checked at compile time, unlike strings of SQL. Furthermore, this is not just for databases: you can run queries over collections of objects, XML documents and more. For databases there's another win - because you are writing in C# or VB syntax, you don't need to worry about the syntax of SQL, or which database server you are using...

Hadi Hariri has sent us his take on Microsoft's TechEd 2007 conference, held in Barcelona.

---

I was in Barcelona last week for TechEd 2007. I have to say, it was a great conference. This year I didn’t present any sessions so I didn’t have the pressure to prepare presentations. Instead, I relaxed and enjoyed my stay. I had quite a few hours of booth duty at the “Ask the Experts” stands, but this was a really exciting opportunity to meet and talk to other developers and see what problems we all share.

I had mixed reactions from the crowd. It was not surprising to see how many developers weren’t “up-to-date” with the latest technology coming out of Redmond. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the rate at which Microsoft is pushing new tools and technologies out can be a mind-baffling experience for many. In fact, for the past two years, and I would have to say that this year even a little more, TechEd has been shifting its content to more relevant sessions on existing technologies and how to provide developers with the right architectural designs and tools to solve their everyday problems. This doesn’t mean to say that new things weren’t covered, quite the contrary, but there has been a tendency to show existing tools too, not just what’s “going to come”...

You've used SSH to log into a shell account on a remote Linux or UNIX server and are happily waiting for a large download or a long compile to complete. All of a sudden, the connection between you and the server is dropped. You log back in, but what you were doing has stopped and you'll have to start again. How annoying!

Recently I have started using screen. This allows you to start additional terminals that you can attach to and detach from. Being able to switch between them means that you can be running a large compile or download and still be able to get on with other things. That's nice, but what is really cool is that these terminals will last between your SSH sessions.

This means that you can start a screen terminal, do some work in it, detach from it, log out, go to another computer, log in again, re-attach to the terminal and it's as if nothing ever happened. If your connection is dropped, then the screen terminal will still be there too - just reconnect, re-attach and keep going...