Last year we put together a team of folks from Corillian, Arcot, Wachovia, and the Microsoft CardSpace team and jointly created a proof-of-concept demo for a user logging into an online banking application using Microsoft CardSpace. I delivered the demo in the Microsoft booth at the RSA 2007 Conference for a whole week, and we had a lot of traffic since the technology was featured in Bill Gates's keynote address at the start of the conference.

Thanks to CardSpace team member Nigel Watling, you can view the demo on Microsoft's Channel 9. We designed the demo so we could use it to tell many different stories. This is one of them.

I am looking forward to reading Bob Uva's new technical blog, http://bobdotnet.wordpress.com. Bob is a friend and colleague at CheckFree, and he's particularly keen on sharing his impressions of WCF.

My whirlwind tour of C# features continues with Whirlwind 3: What's new in C# 2 - Partial types, anonymous methods on Microsoft's Channel 9.

Partial types are quick and easy: split class, struct, and interface definitions across multiple files. I don't cover them in the screencast, but in addition to partial types there are also partial methods, see the resources for details.

Anonymous methods are more involved: pass a block of code inline anywhere a delegate is expected. It's a good idea to understand this concept, since lambda expressions in C# 3.0 build on anonymous methods. You'll see that in a future whirlwind episode.

Resources

Partial Classes and Methods, C# Programming Guide, MSDN Library

partial (Type), C# Reference, MSDN Library

partial (Method), C# Reference, MSDN Library

Anonymous Methods, C# Programming Guide, MSDN Library

Delegates, C# Programming Guide, MSDN Library

delegate, C# Reference, MSDN Library

Create Elegant Code With Anonymous Methods, Iterators, And Partial Classes, Juval Löwy, MSDN Magazine, Visual Studio 2005 Guided Tour issue, 2006 (Vol. 21, No. 3)

Introduction to C# Anonymous Methods, Patrick Smacchia, TheServerSide.NET

Fun with Anonymous Methods, blog post by Brad Adams. The mischievous kind of fun.

Closures and Continuations, blog post by Don Box.

Previous episodes

• Whirlwind 1: What's new in C# 2 - Generics (notes)
• Whirlwind 2: What's new in C# 2 - Iterators (notes)

Don Box and Charles Torre interviewed She-Who-Watches-Microsoft in All About Mary Jo on Channel 9. The informal and slightly irreverent video was filmed backstage at the Lang.NET 2008 conference.

If you're not familiar with her prodigious body of work, Mary Jo Foley has been writing All About Microsoft for ZDNet since September 2006. And prior to that gig she wrote Microsoft Watch for eWeek for eleven years.

In the interview, Don's unrelenting pursuit of the truth and subtle sleuthing uncovers that Mary Jo has written a new book, Microsoft 2.0, due out later this spring. It purports to predict what Microsoft AB (After Bill) will look like.

Note to Don about your new career interests: you really do seem better suited for the sensitive architect role than investigative journalism. I am not saying don't follow your dream, but in the meantime keep your day job.

I keep getting asked this question, so I bet others are asking as well.

Yes, the dates for PDC08 have been announced: 27 – 30 October 2008 in Los Angeles, California. Save the date, and clear the time with your boss, spouse, entourage coordinator, indoor Ultimate Frisbee league, and anyone else who normally has a lock on your coordinates.

No, no other details have been announced yet. I think that Microsoft focused on  TechEd 2008 at the moment.

But you can subscribe to the PDC event RSS feed so that updates are delivered straight to you.

The talks from the 2008 Lang.NET Symposium (28 – 30 January 2008) have been published for your viewing pleasure. The Talks page lets you choose between viewing in the browser using Silverlight, or a viewing .wmv file. If you choose the Silverlight option, hover your mouse near the bottom of the video for playback controls.

I sing the praises of Jimmy Schementi who put them up earlier without realizing the demand for them, and incurred the wrath of his ISP for bogarting the bandwidth. Now the talks are back, and some initial link boo-boos appear to be all better now.

Ted Neward already posted his copious highlights of the symposium (day one, day two, and day three), as well as list of his favorite videos. Ted spoke at Lang.NET on Scala.

My next whirlwind C# tour screencast is up. Whirlwind 2: What's new in C# 2 - Iterators is now on Channel 9 for your viewing pleasure. In just nine minutes you can learn what iterators are and what problem they address. Get down. Get funky.

Resources

Iterators, C# Programming Guide, MSDN Library

yield, C# Reference, MSDN Library

Create Elegant Code With Anonymous Methods, Iterators, And Partial Classes, Juval Löwy, MSDN Magazine, Visual Studio 2005 Guided Tour issue, 2006 (Vol. 21, No. 3)

Fun with Iterators and state machines, Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek (blog). Focus on the cool compiler and runtime magic that makes iterators possible. Based on prereleased Whidbey bits, but you get the idea.

Iterators with C#2, Patrick Smacchia, TheServerSide.net.

Using C# 2.0 iterators to simplify writing asynchronous code part 1 and part 2, Michael Entin's notebook (blog). Stretch your mind: using iterators to implement the .NET asynch pattern.

Previous episodes

Whirlwind 1: What's new in C# 2 - Generics (notes)

Erik and Monica Mork are rocking and rolling on their new Silverlight podcast, SparklingClient.com. The challenge, of course, is to relate a rich graphical user experience (UX), and developer and design experiences, in an audio podcast. Erik and Monica are Portland area developers, and enthusiastic about their topic.

Erik went to MIX08 for the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 release. Download the bits, and the tool, and get started. Then let Sparkling Client be your guide.

Get your hands on slides, code samples, and whatnots from the Boise Code Camp 2008 sessions. My session just points back to posts on this blog: no surprises there. That is all.

The Portland Adobe Developer User Group is hosting Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services Evangelist, on Thursday, 20 March 2008 at 6:00 PM, speaking on "What's Possible in a Post-Web 2.0 World?" at PCC Sylvania, Library Room 112. Networking begins at 5:30 PM.

Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new ideas built on Web Services. You will also learn how others, empowered by technology advances—known as “Web Scale Computing”—created businesses that weren’t practical until recently... (More...)

Amazon has done phenomenal things with Amazon Web Services (AWS), so this ought to be great.

See the Upcoming Meetings for the Portland Adobe Developer User Group for additional details.

My whirlwind screencast series about C# 2.0 and 3.0 language features premiers today on Microsoft's Channel 9. Wahoo!

This is a whirlwind tour of the major language features that have been introduced in C# since the language was first released. The idea is to cover a lot of ground quickly, so that you can get the broad perspective and know what features you want to spend more time learning about. The objective is to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

In this first episode I look at a major feature introduced in C# 2.0: Generics. Watch it on Channel 9:

Whirlwind 1: What's new in C# 2 - Generics

Thanks to my gracious host and producer, Bruce Kyle, Microsoft ISV Advisor. Catch Bruce and his team on the US ISV Developer Evangelism blog.

Resources

Here are a couple of resources for digging deeper into C# generics.

Generics, C# Programming Guide, MSDN Library.

An Introduction to C# Generics, Juval Löwy, Visual Studio 2005 Technical Articles, MSDN Library.

Anders Hejlsberg - What's so great about generics? Channel 9 video. An elevator speech by the fellow who's described himself as chief randomizer on the C# team.

DotNetRock Show #34: Juval Löwy (Again). "Carl and Mark talk to Juval about, among other things, the new version of C# (2.0). Of the new features, Juval's favorite is generics."

Generic Programming Under .NET, and CLR Generics Versus C++ Templates, Stanley B. Lippman, MSDN Magazine, April and June 2005. Pair of articles compare and contrast generics and C++ templates, respectively, by a noted C++ authority.

The Design and Implementation of Generics for the .NET Common Language Runtime, Andrew Kennedy and Don Syme, Microsoft Research, 2001. If you like digging really deep, this is the original research paper on how to introduce generics into the CLR.

If you have a great C# generics resource that I didn't mention, leave a comment about it.

Last month Mary Jo Foley wrote that Microsoft is working on a new language named D as part of Oslo. Before we leap to conclusions about what D might stand for, let us recall that the C language was so named because it was derived from B which was a stripped down version of BCPL. Such is the stuff of software engineers' so-called humor. So much for musing.

Indeed, D is a declarative modeling language. According to Mary Jo, Microsoft's Chief Modeling Officer (nice title) Don Box spoke about D at the 2008 Lang.Net Symposium at the end of January. D, says Don, is about "putting more and more of your application into data and putting less in code." That is central to Oslo, the next technology wave from Microsoft, which has as its goal "making a new class of model-driven and service-enabled applications mainstream."

A few days after Mary Jo's article, InfoWorld ran an article covering Bill Gates speaking at the 2008 Office System Developers Conference on Microsoft's declarative modeling language effort, but Bill didn't mention D by name. Okay, D may very well be a project codename, so let's not get too invested in the name. And even if it is the current name of the language, what are the chances that marketing will be able let an opportunity like that go by unspoiled?

Between these two articles, Don and Bill have some pithy, interesting things to say about declarative languages and their importance in modeling complex systems.