Bruce Eckel and coauthor Jaime King have posted a sample of their upcoming book: C# Query Expressions and 3.0 Features

From the authors:

It's become more common for authors to offer a few pages or sometimes a chapter of their text to the public as a means of marketing. Our aim is to not only provide a sample, but also a useful stand-alone text. By itself, this sample provides any C# 2.0 programmer a foundation in C# 3.0.

This is intended to be a useful mini-book on its own, not just a teaser: it's 239 pages long and includes 82 exercises and solutions. The full book is filled with many more exercises and solutions.

The book covers:

• Extension methods
  • Inheritance vs. extension methods
  • Utilities for this book
  • Extended delegates
  • Other rules
• Implicitly-typed local variables
• Automatic properties
• Implicitly-typed arrays......
• Object initializers
• Collection initializers
• Anonymous types
• Lambda expressions
  • Func
• Query Expressions
• Basic LINQ
• Translation
  • Degeneracy
  • Chained where clauses
• Introduction to Deferred Execution
• Multiple froms
• Transparent identifiers
  • Iteration Variable Scope
• More complex data
• let clauses
• Ordering data
• Grouping data
• Joining data
• Nested Queries
  • into
  • let clause translations
  • let vs. into
  • joining into
  • Outer joins
• Other query operators

Download the sample here.

Microsoft recently published a Software + Services Blueprint for using Silverlight with Sharepoint.  The blueprint includes six samples demonstrating basic tasks like using Silverlight in a Sharepont web part, to advanced tasks like displaying a social network diagram using active directory. 

http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ 

Each sample includes a video, code walkthrough, setup instructions, and a Visual Studio solution that can be downloaded separately or as a single package.

The full open source blueprint source code is said to be coming soon. 

The Patterns & Practices group has published a beta version of their Team Development with TFS best practices guide.  According to J.D. Meier:

It's our Microsoft playbook for TFS.  This is our guide to help show you how to make the most of Team Foundation Server.  It's a distillation of many lessons learned.  It's a collaborative effort among product team members, field, industry experts, MVPs, and customers.

The contents (360 pages) include:

Parts
Part I, Fundamentals
Part II, Source Control
Part III, Builds
Part IV, Large Project Considerations
Part V, Project Management
Part VI, Process Guidance
Part VII, Reporting
Part VIII, Setting Up and Maintaining the Team Environment

 

Chapters
Introduction
Ch 01 - Introducing the Team Environment
Ch 02 - Team Foundation Server Architecture
Ch 03 - Structuring Projects and Solutions
Ch 04 - Structuring Projects and Solutions in Team Foundation Server
Ch 05 - Defining Your Branching and Merging Strategy
Ch 06 - Managing Source Control Dependencies in Visual Studio Team System
Ch 07 - Team Build Explained
Ch 08 - Setting Up Continuous Integration with Team Build
Ch 09 - Setting Up Scheduled Builds with Team Build
Ch 10 - Large Project Considerations
Ch 11 - Project Management Explained
Ch 12 - Work Items Explained
Ch 13 – MSF Agile Projects
Ch 14 - Process Templates Explained
Ch 15 - Reporting Explained
Ch 16 - Team Foundation Server Deployment
Ch 17 - Providing Internet Access to Team Foundation Server

Krzysztof Cwalina is a Program Manager on the Microsoft .Net Framework team and one of the principal architects of the base class library.  Along with Brad Adams, he wrote the Framework Design Guidelines, which is available on MSDN or in hardcover.  The hardcover includes in-line comments from several other framework developers, which provide background on the reasoning and internal debates that occurred around various guidelines.  If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

If you're more of a "wait for the movie" type of person, you're in luck!  Krzysztof recently gave a Designing .Net Class Libraries presentation to Microsoft Research, which was recorded and is available online.  It is a three hour presentation, so you might want to bring sodas and popcorn.  From Microsoft:

This class presents best practices for designing frameworks that are reusable object-oriented libraries. The guidelines are applicable to frameworks ranging in size and in their scale of reuse from large system frameworks to small components shared among several applications. They started as a small set of naming and design conventions, but have been enhanced, scrutinized, and refined to a point where they are generally considered the canonical way to design frameworks at Microsoft. They carry the experience and cumulative wisdom of thousands of developer hours, over three versions of the .NET Framework.

[Update: 10/15/07]  The video is now available for download for offline viewing.

I recently upgraded my Safari subscription to the "all you can eat" option.  One of the benefits is access to "rough cuts" - books that are still in development, but already have substantial content.  One such book that I've been browsing is High Performance Web Sites, by Steve Souders - Yahoo!'s "Chief Performance Yahoo!".  He offers 14 rules that "have been tested on some of the most popular sites on the Internet and have successfully reduced the response times of those pages by 25-50%". 

Rule 1 - Minimize HTTP Requests
Rule 2 - Use Edge Computing
Rule 3 - Add an Expires Header
Rule 4 - Gzip Components
Rule 5 - Move Stylesheets to the Top
Rule 6 - Move Scripts to the Bottom
Rule 7 - Avoid CSS Expressions
Rule 8 - Inline in Home Pages
Rule 9 - Minimize Domains
Rule 10 - Minify JavaScript
Rule 11 - Avoid Redirects
Rule 12 - Remove Duplicate Scripts
Rule 13 - Turn off ETags
Rule 14 - Make AJAX Cacheable and Small

A more appropriate title might be "High Performance Web Pages", as these are predominately page-level optimizations.  That is the title of the book's companion web site, wich has before/after examples of each of the rules.  This site is worth checking out, even if you don't have the book or a Safari subscription.

I just started reading through Charles Petzold's new book on Windows Presentation Foundation: Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation.  What was going to be the initial C#/.Net primer chapter of this book, ended up being a seperate 267 page book of its own, entitled .Net Book Zero.  He decided to make this book available as a free download!  You can get it here: http://www.charlespetzold.com/dotnet

Don't be confused by the version number.  The book is version 1.1, but it covers .Net 2.0. 

One of my clients is presently in the performance testing/tuning phase for their site, which supports 10 countries with localized content.  Localized sites require a bit more work to enable ASP.net caching.  In the declarative code you must set the VaryByCustom attribute of @Outputcache to a meaningful value.  This value is arbitrary, but should be something logical like 'uiCulture'.  Then, override HttpApplication.GetVaryByCustomString to return the current UI culture string when the 'custom' parameter value matches the value you specified in the VaryByCustom attribute.

Michele Leroux Bustamante has an article on the TheServerSide with some good tips on ASP.Net localization, in general.  It includes a "Caching Strategies for Localization" section with sample code for the above techniques.

Patrick Y. Ng posted a great article and FAQ on Session State.  Worth a read if you've had strange session-related challenges, as I have recently.

From Patrick:

The article is divided into two parts:
1. "Understanding Session State Modes" - to help you to understand the difference between the three modes of session state.
2. FAQ

Casey Chesnut posted a fairly comprehensive article detailing his experience creating a prototype of Apple's Front Row using Windows Presentation Foundation.  I'm impressed by what he accomplished with two weeks of his spare time.  From Casey:

/backRow is my last 2 weeks with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). the article explains how i used WPF and the MediaPlayer SDK to create a rapid prototype of Apple's new media center program called FrontRow. this includes Music, Photo, DVD, and Video functionality. there are side by side screenshots, videos of its usage, and source code

I just watched Charlie Owen's PDC presentation on Windows Vista Media Center.  I had seen and commented on the associated PowerPoint before.  For me, the most interesting part of this video is the Q&A with the audience at the end.  There were, of course, a lot of "I can't comment on that now" answers.  But many good development questions were answered, as well.

You can stream or download the video.