Joe Rattz has posted a new video demo on his Linqdev website showing how to setup a project to leverage LINQ to SQL.

You’ll find the demo here on Joe’s blog. The rest of the site – and in particular Joe’s forums – are also well worth a look if you’re in the process of getting to grips with LINQ.

Interested in winning a copy of Halo 3 Legendary Edition and some Apress .NET books? Well, all you have to do is enter our LINQ Contest and the prizes could be yours. Have fun and good luck!

I’ve seen some discussion around the net where some are asking about the benefit of auto-implemented properties in C# 3.0. For the benefit of those that are unfamiliar, let’s have a quick introduction to what auto-implemented properties are.

Many books introduce C#, but if you don’t have the time to read 1200 pages, Accelerated C# 2008 gives you everything you need to know about C# 2008 in a concentrated 500 pages of must-know information and best practices.

C# 2008 offers powerful new features, and Accelerated C# 2008 is the fastest path to mastery, for both experienced C# programmers moving to C# 2008 and programmers moving to C# from another object-oriented language.

You’ll quickly master C# syntax while learning how the CLR simplifies many programming tasks. You’ll also learn best practices that ensure your code will be efficient, reusable, and robust. Why spend months or years discovering the best ways to design and code C# when this book will show you how to do things the right way, right from the start?

The first edition of this book was released at the 2001 Tech Ed conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Since that time, this text has been revised, tweaked, and enhanced to account for the changes found within each release of the .NET platform (1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and now 3.5).

The last version, .NET 3.0, was more of an augmentative release, essentially providing three new APIs: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). As you would expect, coverage of the “W’s” has been expanded a great deal in this version of the book from the previous Special Edition text.

Unlike .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5 provides dozens of new C# language features and .NET APIs. This edition of the book will walk you through all of this new material using the same readable approach as was found in previous editions. Rest assured, you’ll find detailed coverage of Language Integrated Query (LINQ), the C# 2008 language changes (automatic properties, extension methods, anonymous types, etc.) and the numerous bells and whistles of Visual Studio 2008.

Tech Ed EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) kicked off today with a very different feel from Tech Ed US. The trance music and graffiti artists that formed the prelude set a precedent for ‘Soma’ Somasegar’s under-hyped, low-key presentational style. For all that, the keynote wasn’t short of substance.
The topics he touched on were many and varied and the audience was kept waiting until half way through for the news that they all wanted to hear: that .NET 3.5 will ship this month.

It won’t be long before Microsoft release their new MVC framework for ASP.NET. Just looking at a huge list of MVC frameworks for other web languages shows that there is certainly something going on. Java MVC frameworks, such as Spring and Struts are mature and very popular.

As you may be aware, the popular Database Publishing Wizard from the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit will now be part of VS 2008 (not the C# or VB Express editions, however). This is quite a major addition as it’s only coming as part of RTM and isn’t in Beta2.