C# 3.0

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit - Labs Tutorials Powerpoint Presentation Demos

Dave Hayden — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:08:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit - Labs Tutorials Powerpoint Presentation Demos

If you are looking for hands-on-labs, tutorials, examples, Powerpoint Presentation Slides, and demos on the new features of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Framework, the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit may be what you are looking for. From the site:

“The Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including: LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management.“

You can download it here.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Tutorials

Patterns & Practices Talk in Sarasota Florida on Thursday, December 6, 2007

Dave Hayden — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 09:45:00 GMT

Patterns & Practices Talk in Sarasota Florida on Thursday, December 6, 2007

by David Hayden ( Microsoft MVP C# )

If you are interested in the Web Client Software Factory and Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition, come out to the Sarasota .NET Developer Group on Thursday, December 6th to see these cool new offerings from Microsoft Patterns & Practices. I will be discussing the Web Client Software Factory v2.0 and fellow MVP Stan Schultes will be showing off the Web Service Software Factory.

In the WCSF presentation I will be showing off the following 3 guidance bundles that will help you easily develop responsive Web UI's using ASP.NET AJAX:

AutoComplete Bundle ( AutoComplete Functionality with a Twist )
Validation Bundle ( Server-Side Validation using ASP.NET AJAX )
Search Bundle ( Real-Time Search Functionality via ASP.NET AJAX )

Given the recent release of Visual Studio 2008, I will also be showing off various C# and .NET 3.5 Features in the process:

The event details:

Date: Thursday, December 6, 2007

Time: 6:00pm

Location:

Sarasota Community Foundation
2635 Fruitville Rd.
Sarasota, FL 34237

Look forward to seeing you there.

Pluggable Frameworks and Libraries - Discovering Classes Using Reflection and Attributes

Dave Hayden — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 22:20:00 GMT

There are many ways to make frameworks and libraries more extensible via pluggable providers. Here is code that shows how to using reflection and custom attributes to find types in an assembly to evaluate expressions in a custom configuration section. This draws upon the concept of ExpressionEvaluators and ExpressionBuilders. Read more...

Dependency Injection Parameters and Properties Like Castle Windsor

Dave Hayden — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 20:26:00 GMT

Dependency Injection Parameters and Properties Like Castle Windsor

by David Hayden ( Florida .NET Developer )

Castle Windsor has concepts of parameters and properties to help inject dependencies like strings and integers into your classes. For example, you may have a database service that requires a connection string to the database:

public class SqlDatabase : IDatabase
{
    public SqlDatabase(string connectionString)
    {
        ...
    }
}

The connection string isn't something that you would find in the container, so you need to add a parameter into the configuration to specify the value:

<component service="IDatabase" type="SqlDatabase">
  <parameters>
    <connectionString>MyConnectionString</connectionString>
  </parameters>
</component>

If you find that many components may use the connection string as a parameter, you can add a property to the configuration and use the property in the parameter:

<properties>
    <connection>MyConnectionString</connection>
</properties>


<component service="IDatabase" type="SqlDatabase">
  <parameters>
    <connectionString>#{connection}</connectionString>
  </parameters>
</component>

where #{connection} refers to the value of the connection property above. This way if the connection string changes you ownly need to change the property and not all the parameters.

This is all very, very cool and a necessary feature of any decent dependency injection tool.

I added this functionality today to my dependency injection tool.

In addition to the functionality above, I also added the concept of ExpressionEvaluators which I based on ExpressionBuilders in ASP.NET 2.0. I can specify a parameter value pulled from ConnectionStrings, like:

<add interfaceType="IDatabase" concreteType="SqlDatabase">
  <parameters>
      <add
        key="connectionString"
        value="${ConnectionString:MyConnectionString}" />
  </parameters>
</add>

The ConnectionStringExpressionEvaluator will look for the named connection string MyConnectionString in the app.config or web.config and use it as the parameter value for connectionString.

If you instead want to get a value from AppSettings, the AppSettingExpressionEvaluator will take care of that one:

<add interfaceType="IDatabase" concreteType="SqlDatabase">
    <parameters>
        <add
            key="connectionString"
            value="${AppSetting:MyConnectionString}" />
    </parameters>
</add>

There is also the concept of globals which are the same as properties in Windsor. You can use expressions in the globals as well:

<globals>
  <add
    key="MyConnectionString"
    value="${ConnectionString:MainConnectionString}" />
</globals>



<add interfaceType="IDatabase" concreteType="SqlDatabase">
    <parameters>
        <add
            key="connectionString"
            value="#{MyConnectionString}" />
    </parameters>
</add>

This last addition makes my dependency injection tool feature complete for 1.0.

by David Hayden ( Florida .NET Developer )

Software Development Tip: Avoid Race Conditions Using Tester-Doer Pattern

Dave Hayden — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:49:00 GMT

One of the patterns that came up today in a code review was the Tester-Doer Pattern. One sees this pattern a lot especially when the “doer” side of the equation has a pretty decent performance penalty. Essentially, you test a condition to make sure you need to do the “doer“ operation and pay that penalty. Sometimes this can cause race conditions. Read more...

C# Automatic Properties in Use during Visual Studio 2008 Development

Dave Hayden — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 11:28:00 GMT

C# Automatic Properties is just one of a number of new C# 3.0 Features that you can experience during Visual Studio 2008 development. It feels different using the new C# features in an actual web application as opposed to just writing C# tutorials about them. Read more...

C# and VB Partial Methods in Orcas Beta 2 for Code Generation - Business Object Validation Example

Dave Hayden — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:39:00 GMT

In Orcas Beta 2 we will see partial methods, which provides a hook for developers to “inject” code into partial classes without running the risk of that code being overwritten when the class is being generated in the future. Read more...

Visual Studio "Orcas" March 2007 CTP Download - LINQ ADO.NET C# 3.0 Entity Data Model

Dave Hayden — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:13:00 GMT

Visual Studio "Orcas" March 2007 CTP Download - LINQ ADO.NET C# 3.0

by David Hayden ( Microsoft MVP C# ), Filed: C# 3.0 Tutorials

The Visual Studio “Orcas” March 2007 CTP is available for download.

This is the first one I will be downloading because it represents a big milestone for the LINQ and ADO.NET Features. I will be doing a lot of tutorials on LINQ and ADO.NET over the next few weeks.

Visual Studio Highlights:

C# 3.0 Language Support: This CTP implements all of the C#3.0 language features from the May LINQ CTP including:
- Query Expressions
- Object and Collection Initializers
- Extension Methods
- Local Variable Type Inference and Anonymous Types
- Lambda Expressions bound to Delegates and Expression trees
- Complete design-time support: Intellisense, Formatting, Colorization

LINQ to ADO.NET
- ADO.NET is fully integrated with LINQ and offers many options for using LINQ in various scenarios: LINQ to SQL provides direct access to database tables from the programming environment, LINQ to Entities enables developers to use LINQ over EDM models, and LINQ to DataSet allows the full expressivity of LINQ to be used over DataSets.
- LINQ to Entities enables developers to program against a relational database using a view of the data that is appropriate for the application they are building, independent of the structure of the underlying database. The use of the Entity Data Model (EDM) enables developers to design models that follow the concepts built into the application, instead of having to map them to constructs available in relational stores. LINQ to Entities is built on the ADO.NET Provider model and will support working against different back end relational stores in addition to Microsoft SQL Server. This CTP includes a LINQ to Entities provider for SQL Server and SQL Server Compact Edition.
- LINQ to SQL (previous name DLinq) has enhanced the functionality from the May 2006 LINQ CTP. You can find it in System.Data.Linq namespace in System.Data.Linq.dll. New in this release is that DataContext provides optimized modes for read-only use and serialization . Also new is that DataShape streamlines eager loading capabilities and adds the ability to set queries on relationships

ADO.NET
- Extended, more powerful data APIs with the ADO.NET Entity Framework
  - With the ADO.NET Entity Framework developers will be able to model the view of the data that is appropriate for each one of the applications they are building, independently of the structure of the data in the underlying database. The use of the Entity Data Model (EDM) enables developers to design models that follow the concepts built into the application, instead of having to map them to constructs available in relational stores. Once the model is in place, the powerful ADO.NET Entity Framework API is used to access and manipulate the data as .NET classes or as rows and columns, whatever is appropriate for each application.
- Added paging and stored procedures for update (“update customization”) for ADO.NET Entity Framework:
  - Paging: the paging support in the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows developers to “page” over data in a database by indicating the start row and number of rows to be included in the result. Paging is available through Entity SQL (using the LIMIT AND SKIP keywords) and through the query-builder methods in the ObjectQuery class (Top and Skip). In a future CTP the feature will also be enabled to be used in LINQ queries by means of the standard Take and Skip LINQ operators.
  - Stored-procedures for update customization: the Entity Framework by default automatically generates SQL statements for insert, update and delete operations when processing changes to entities in memory to be sent to the database. With the stored-procedures update customization feature developers have the option to override the automatic SQL generation and instead provide stored-procedures that will perform the insert, update and delete operations, which the system will call during entity change processing. Among other things, this enables scenarios where direct access to tables is restricted in the database and the only way to make changes to the data is through stored-procedures.
- Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET
  - Provides an application programming interface (API) to synchronize data between data services and a local store. The Synchronization Services API is modeled after the ADO.NET data access APIs and gives you an intuitive way to synchronize data. It makes building applications for occasionally connected environments a logical extension of building applications where you can depend on a consistent network connection.

Cool stuff.

Download here.

Source: David Hayden ( Microsoft MVP C# )

Filed: C# 3.0 Tutorials

LINQ Query Expressions and .NET Framework 3.5 Support in Reflector 5.0 - LINQ and C# 3.0 Tutorials

Dave Hayden — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 12:26:00 GMT

LINQ Query Expressions and .NET Framework 3.5 Support in Reflector 5.0 - LINQ and C# 3.0 Tutorials

by David Hayden ( Florida Microsoft MVP C# ), Filed: Must Have .NET Developer Tools, C# 3.0 Tutorials

Everyone has probably heard that the new version of Reflector, version 5.0, was released recently. Reflector and several of its add-ins are must have .NET Developer Tools for spelunking into assemblies, etc.

Reflector 5.0 has LINQ and .NET Framework 3.5 Support as mentioned in the ReadMe File:

“LINQ and .NET Framework 3.5: Reflector supports query expressions and other concepts introduced in C# 3.5. To enable this feature select ".NET 3.5" under View, Options, Disassembler, Optimization.“

Very Cool. Just set your Reflector 5.0 Options to optimize for .NET Framework 3.5:

I have compiled a bunch of LINQ and C# 3.0 Tutorials for the new features to be released in Visual Studio “Orcas”:

LINQ and C# 3.0 Tutorials

Source: by David Hayden ( Florida Microsoft MVP C# )

Filed: Must Have .NET Developer Tools, C# 3.0 Tutorials

LINQ Video with Anders Hejlsberg - LINQ Tutorials - C# 3.0 Language Enhancements for LINQ

Dave Hayden — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:56:00 GMT

LINQ Video with Anders - LINQ Tutorials - C# 3.0 Language Enhancements for LINQ

by David Hayden ( Florida .NET Developer ), Filed: C# 3.0

Charlie Calvert shot a great video on LINQ with Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of C#. The video focuses on what it takes to create the Language INtegrated Query functionality such that it is not tied to a particular engine ( SQL, XML, In-Memory Collections, etc. ). Anders talks about Functional Programming and Metaprogramming as well as some particular language enhancements such as Lambda Expressions, Extension Methods, Query Expressions, and Expression Trees that will be in C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 to make LINQ possible and usable. I recommend the video as a good overview of the LINQ Big Picture.

I have written several tutorials on the new C# 3.0 Language Enhancements for LINQ to get you up to speed if you are interested:

Source: David Hayden ( Florida .NET Developer )

Filed: C# 3.0