I'm snowed under with work for our Belgian Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006, so not a lot of blogging or feed reading lately. But the good news is we're on track with the organization and content of the event. All development related sessions are 100% confirmed. All session abstracts (day 1 & day 2) and most speaker bios can be found on-line. Next thing on the agenda is the review of the slide decks and make them available to the attendees. They should be accessible to the attendees by the end of next week.
In the meantime our Belgian webteam has been working hard on publishing two new articles on the local MSDN site.
The first article is authored by Peter Himschoot and covers "C# 3.0 and LINQ".
Anders Hejlsberg, chief designer of C#, unveiled C#’s newest version at PDC2005. Some of the most notable innovations are extension methods, lambda expressions, anonymous types, type inference, and LINQ (.NET Language Integrated Query). In this article we are going to look at these new features of C#, focusing on LINQ.
The second article is written by Jelle Druyts. Jelle covers "The Command Pattern In Windows Presentation Foundation".
Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly codenamed "Avalon"), or WPF for short, is a brand new Microsoft framework for developing very rich and powerful Windows applications. It will ship as part of Windows Vista, the next major version of Windows that will be released in the coming months, but WPF will also be available on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003. There is much to be said about Windows Presentation Foundation and its numerous new and enhanced capabilities, but this article will in stead focus on an old trusted friend, who has finally been given a dedicated room in the big house of Windows User Interface development: the "Command" pattern. This design pattern basically abstracts all actions the user can perform in an application into the notion of "commands"; it has been implemented in many different ways on top of various UI frameworks, but now, it has finally made it into the gut of the system itself. Note that this article is based on a public preview of WPF, so it's possible that there are implementation details that will change over time as the product matures into completion.
Both authors will also be speakers at Developer & IT-Pro Days and when you would have questions for them you will be able to find them in the community area during the breaks.