Recently MSPress gave me a copy of Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2008: The Language (Donis Marshall, ISBN 0735625409) to read and review. Having read the book cover to cover, I thoroughly enjoyed every page.

Background

First, a quick bit of background to let you know where I’m coming from. I’m a self-taught C# and .NET programmer – so this is the first book I’ve read on the subject. I wasn’t expecting to learn much about C# itself in the book, more the technologies that were added in .NET 3.5 (LINQ, extension functions, etc). Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised.

Look and Feel

Overall, the book reads like a technical manual. Marshall writes in a very dry fashion, and it’s not the type of book you would read from end-to-end for the sake of reading a book. The use of code samples and real life examples help solidify lessons are fantastic to understand the technical jargon used. All of the paragraphs are kept short and concise are often intermingled with MSDN style documentation and examples.

Typically, the learning curve in each chapter is quite sharp, starting with basic knowledge about the subject and rapidly accelerating to the newer and complex features that .NET 3.5 introduces. The chapters are very content heavy, but this load is lightened by attempting to replicate the examples are trying out new knowledge in Visual Studio while reading. Mixing reading with coding is probably the best way to maximise the learning from this book.

Target Audience

Marshall requests a basic knowledge of programming and Object Orientated concepts. I would also add that a basic knowledge of C#, .NET and Visual Studio are highly recommended. This book is by no means a ‘C# for Dummies’ style guide. The book is more angled towards .NET 2.0 programmers looking to upgrade, Java (or other OO) programmers looking to switch languages or a Computer Science student who wishes to learn .NET.

Content

To say the least, this book is fantastic. Marshall demonstrates her mastery of .NET in the deep level of knowledge presented in this book. There were a great number of things that I learnt for the first time while reading this book, even basic concepts of C# (did you know that C# has a ?? operator?). The topics presented spread from basic Visual Studio usage to LINQ, delegates and the operations of the .NET Garbage Collector.

I’ve learnt a massive amount from this book, and am much more confident in using some of the new features in .NET 3.5 such as Lambda functions and LINQ. The book also contained quite a lot that I would have never learnt from my self-learning such as the internal workings of the Garbage Collector and using some advanced debugging and profiling tools.

Conclusion

Reading this book was beyond valuable for me. I have improved my coding techniques and now understand other coding examples much easier. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with some experience with Object Orientated languages and techniques who wishes to start coding in C# .NET 3.5.

More info and books at http://www.mspress.com.au/ 

- Daniel Paoliello
Curtin MSP

Check it out!

If you were looking for big announcements regarding Mesh at PDC – you may be slightly disappointed, then again, this may a couple of birthdays rolled into one!

The 3rd major company to take the leap (after Amazon’s S3 and Google’s App Engine), Microsoft are attempting to hit the ground running and shake up the cloud industry with the release of Windows Azure. To quote from the official site, Azure is a 64-bit operating system on top of which your cloud services will run and more importantly, scale.

There aren’t a lot of demo apps that currently exist – although perhaps the best application that I can use to demonstrate the (future) power of Azure is Live Mesh. As you can see from the following architecture overview Mesh is an integral part of Azure and the services strategy at Microsoft (in fact, Live Mesh’s logo has now become the overall icon for Live Services) and is itself built on top of Azure:

Azure Services Overview

You can Register for the Tech Preview (includes download links), and while you’re waiting for an invite you can play around with the SDK local environment (which should simulate Azure). Note that you will require Vista or Windows Server 2008 to run this (XP not supported) and the correct bit version (32 will not work on 64 under WOW).

Instead of waffling about what Azure will be, I’ve found the following links to be super helpful:

Azure Main Site

Overview (Microsoft Watch)

MyCloud wiki

Video: Introducting Windows Azure

Video: Windows Azure for Developers

What will be your first cloud app?

Thanks to a tip off from ScottGu we bring you news of the release of Silverlight 2!

Silverlight 2 supports Windows and Mac (and you can always check out Moonlight for linux) and comes with an improved toolkit for everything from standard & custom controls to networking and media streaming support.

Developers will be particularly interested in the Getting Started website which includes walkthroughs from the obligatory “Hello World!” right through the usage of controls and database bindings.

Check it out!

NB Don’t forget to uninstall any betas before installing the release version

Just back from Imagine ‘08 – what an awesome event!

The event was opened by Luke who stepped everyone through a number of videos highlighting the Power of students. Luke also discussed Dreamspark which has finally landed Down Under and Imagine Cup ‘09. Who knows? Maybe this year we’ll finally see a UWA team!

David then stepped in with “Gaming your way onto Facebook” – an awesome demo which stepped through the creation of a Popfly shoot-em-up which was then published, with leaderboard, to Facebook.

Next we ran a quick session about the MS Internship process. UWA has 3 interns going this year, the second highest from any university (apart from UQ), beating out universities like UNSW and USyd and decimating Victoria (none!). Great news for anyone at UWA who may have thought that being too far over West was a disadvantage.

I then followed up with a quick overview some online services being offered by Microsoft – Deep Zoom, Photosynth and Live Mesh, if you haven’t checked them out – do so! Don’t forget to sign up for the UWA Live Mesh Comp as well and beat out the other unis (including our blog brothers from Curtin)…

From there we moved to on to the IEEE supported free BBQ for participants where we handed out a boat load of swag and prizes to some happy recipients.

We’re always interested in feedback – so leave us a message (or two) with what you thought.

See you at our next event!

I’m sitting in a great session on Hyper-V (SVR304 Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Architecture Scenarios and Networking Deep Dive) where we’re getting an in-depth technical layout of Hyper-V how it works, what it does and how well it works (perhaps marketing speak, but I can confirm that Hyper-V rocks performance wise). Some of the VMs that are popping up on the screen during the demo portion are Novell SUSE – which in itself is cool enough.

Microsoft have had a very good relationship with Novell over their SUSE offering (although a quick search will show you that both companies have suffered a lot of online negative rap about these deals) although I’m still impressed that they would show it in a demo.

But I was blown up when Tux made a showing!

          

(and yeah, the photos are blurred – sorry )

As I looked back over my photos from yesterday’s keynote (below) I realised that there wasn’t that much information about the Keynote in yesterday’s post. So here’s what went down:

• The Keynote started with a general TechEd collaboration video that emphasised MSDN and TechNet as community oriented sites
• Afterwords there were quick words from Tracy Fellows head of Microsoft in Australia, intKeyroducing the keynote speaker
• The Keynote speaker was Amit Mital lead (and one of the founders) of the Live Mesh team. He showed a video that emphasised connectivity between al devices (think tv, mobile, house (alarms, door locks), computers) via the cloud. So much so, that when a laptop gets destroyed in the movie the main actor gets a different machine and loads it up with his info and gets his own desktop back.
• Dr. Niel got up and demoed two instances of software + Services (the current mantra from Microsoft, emphasising a move to the cloud). He also “let slip” and showed off Live Mesh on his mobile (this was live, not recorded), by syncing photos between his mobile and laptop.

Photo Goodness:

Stay tuned for more!

Straight from the grapevine it looks like great things are coming for Semester 2! Apart form the launch of Dreamspark (coming soon!) we are in early stages of preperation for a developer oriented event at UWA.

As usual there’ll be heaps of free giveaways and aawesome prizes to pick up – so make sure to stay tuned for more details!

Got suggestions? Questions? Anything else? Feel free to leave a comment below…

Hot off the press – Group Shot is a nifty little toy from Microsoft Research that solves the group shot problem. Have you ever taken multiple photos of a group of people, only to be thwarted time and time again by different people closing their eyes?

Group Shot solves this by allowing you to select the “good parts” (i.e. all those open eyes) of all the images and then joining everything together into one final shot. You can use this to make sure that everyone in that family shot is looking at the camera, and that those unwanted photobombers are history!

Check out the example (and tutorial) or go straight to Group Shot for a download.

It’s exam period as well, so Good Luck to all, and stay tuned for exciting happenings coming to a University near you!

In what can only be described as “it’s about time” DreakSpark is set to land in Australia on September 2^th during the Australian Tech. Ed 2008 (Sydney) Student Day.

What do I get with DreamSpark?

DreamSpark currently contains:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Version
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0 (+ Creators Club)

So what’s so great about DreamSpark you ask?

Yup, you get all the software it comes with via MSDN-AA anyway – but there are two big differences:

1. The license is unencumbered so you can use it for profit
2. XNA Creators Club! Perfect for those with Xboxs (and Zunes soon) the Creators Club grants you access to exclusive content and the ability to develop and debug games directly on the Xbox (but you already know that of course, because you attended game camp!)

It’s nice to (finally) see DreamSpark make it’s way down South – we’ll keep you posted as more information roles in!

As my day job is working in an Accounting practice I come across problems all the time, that can be solved with computers.

One day I was given the task of looking up the historial share prices of stocks. Given the number of stocks, this wasn’t going to be a nice job, as I would have had to lookup each stock individually.

Another problem that existed was all the major finance websites that have historical data often get it wrong. Just plain wrong. I’ve found errors with Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, etc, etc.

So to do this job, I made a little .NET program called StockPrice.

Using Visual Studio 2008 I was able to very quickly (about an hour) come up with a multi-threaded program that grabbed historial prices from 3 major sites and compared them to each other, giving what it thinks is the most likely price on that day. Further more, Visual Studio 2008 allows me to OneClick publish the program for automatic updates and installation from the web.

If you are interested, please download it and take a look. I am very interested in any feedback you may have. I am happy to support it to an extent at http://forum.wamsp.com.au.

You can check it out at http://www.tidesoft.com.au/stockprice

Please note: The way Google Finance displays historical stock prices for ASX stocks is not consistent. Thus, often the Google price will be out by a day. Be sure to check the date returned on each source.

Luke
MSP (UWA)

One of the common issues that I have is that I want to join in on Open Source projects (because their doing something cool, for experience, etc); but they are usually in some weird\archaic language (like C or PASCAL) whereas I’d MUCH rather use C#.NET. Alternatively, they have a Linux setup and would prefer other developers to be using Linux as well (to avoid cross-OS issues before a final release is ready).

Codeplex is self-described as “Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site”. So, while there are projects on there that Microsoft has started (eg AJAX Control Toolkit, bluePortal, Gimme and many others); there are thousands that are being run by individual teams. In fact, Microsoft has gone as far as to say guarantee it “does not control, review, revise, endorse or distribute the third party projects on this site” – ensuring that the community-oriented aspect of the Open Source projects is not questioned (personally, I believe that some of the projects should be reviewed by Microsoft…).

What Codeplex Offers for Developers

• File space and a great looking site to release their project
• A community of like-minded developers
• An integrated Issue Tracker and Discussion system; allowing the community to participate as well
• Ability to use any technology to create a project, and any licence to release it
• A Team Foundation Server for Version Control and Work Item tracking
• WebTrends to gain statistics on people viewing, interacting with and downloading your project
• SVN support (for those not wanting to use TFS)
• A completely Ad-less interface

What Codeplex Offers Everybody

Mainly, an easy and excellent way to find Open Source projects and communicate with the people managing and running these projects. To keep up to date, Codeplex also allows Syndications (RSS) for all projects - allowing you to stay up to date easily.

Codeplex is also working on the “Codeplex Client” that will allow anybody to get any piece of code from Codeplex without having to be a Contributor, Developer, Coordinator or even without requiring a registered account at all.

Codeplex is also always trying to improve itself; and so is self-listed (a MetaListing?).

Some Cool Projects

These are just some things that I thought were pretty nifty

For Developers

• AJAX Control Toolkit – An extremely useful set of ASP.NET AJAX controls
• BlogEngine.NET – An ASP.NET based blogging app
• Silverglobe – A Silverlight-based 3D globe\map
• Script# – Compile C# into JavaScript
• NetMassDownloader – Allows batch downloading of the .NET source code
• IronPython – Python for .NET (with Visual Studio 2005 integration)

For Everyone

• Rawr – For people who love World of Warcraft
• BeyondPod – RSS and Podcast manager for Windows Mobile
• GMobileSync – Allows Google Calendars to sync with Windows Mobile
• GameKnight – A Nintendo GameBoy and GameBoy Colour emulator (built entirely in C# and DirectX)
• Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager – Allows multiple desktops in Windows

If you are spot a cool project, or are working on one, leave a link in the comments!

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

Weird tributes to the original HoTMaiL way of spelling things aside, how many of you have ever tried to send a somewhat complex html email that needs to be read in clients other than Outlook? One of the best ways to achieve this is to write out the HTML yourself, but there seems to be next to no support for this in Outloook and meagre support in Thunderbird (an old extension).

If you’ve installed Vista or Server 2008 and you happen to be wanting to write HTML email – then your in luck! The new “Windows Mail” client (which replaced Outlook Express) comes with a convenient “Source Edit” mode that lets you view and edit the source of your email on the fly:

Things to Note:

• Make sure you should be sending HTML mail before you send it. Not everyone can / likes to receive HTML email so it’s a good idea to provide them with a plain text alternative.
• Use style=”" attributes rather than the <style> tags to define CSS. Although this will make your HTML mighty messy, it will ensure that everyone actually renders your styles. Clients like gmail will not render <style> tags no matter where they are placed.
• It’s recommended that you send a few test emails around to the different clients (web and otherwise) around (Live, Google, Yahoo, Outlook, Thunderbird etc.) to see that your mail is rendering as you expect it to. I recently sent an email that Yahoo rendered with blue text that underlined when the mouse hovered over it. Go figure.

I came across an interesting thing today while wandering around the web (as you do…).

Firstly, the new version of Silverlight, as well as the announcement and release of Silverlight for Series 60 Symbian phones. Even though the Silverlight site claims that Silverlight is “cross-device” the only devices it is being offered on is PC and Symbian phones – what happened to PDA’s? Why would Microsoft release Silverlight to a competitor (ie the Symbian developers) when they haven’t released it on their own devices?

To solve this conundrum, I decided to visit the Windows Mobile Developer Centre to see if there was a beta of Silverlight or, in the least, some sort of announcement. Then I noticed the kicker: there is a RSS Feed collator box on the homepage entitled “Rich Internet Applications” that is pulling no feeds, though it has the cryptic message of “The ability to create Rich Internet Applications on the Windows Mobile platform is coming soon. Stay tuned…”.

Silverlight on Windows Mobile; it would defiantly bring both of these platforms to the next level – and make it that much better for developers.

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

UPDATE:

It appears that Microsoft did announce Silverlight 1 for Windows Mobile: http://silverlight.net/learn/mobile.aspx
Still, this doesn’t decrease the prospect of how cool it will be.

Thanks to Jim Wilson (http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/jimw/) for pointing this out.

What better way to start a first post but with the news that Microsoft is releasing some source code (albeit under an Academic license)?

Singularity is a Microsoft Research project involving the creation of a new Operating System based on an abstract instruction set and type safe languages (i.e. it’s based on .NET). The OS uses a concept of SIPs (Software-Isolated Processes) to load and control processes which are limited into their own address space. Due to the managed nature of the running code, programs can be verified by the OS at install time, runtime or during any other controlled interaction.

The source code download weighs in at 61MB (it’s a zip file with all of the sources and build scripts) – small enough to warrant a quick look. Check it out – you never know, your next OS course may just happen to be based on Singularity!