Galin Iliev's blog

I am giving a talk this Thursday in front of SofiaDev .NET User group at local Microsoft office at 18:30 local time.

In the presentation I will show:

1. New tools in IIS7 as well as new administration options
2. New tracing and diagnostics options
3. New integration pipeline
4. Deep example that:
• use custom IIS module written in C#
• extend IIS configuration schema
• extend IIS Manager by adding UI component

If this sounds interesting to you and you want to attend write to branimir _ at _ sofiadev dot org

See you there!

The title might seems strange as in 99.99% of cases we cannot afford Visual Studio in production environment. Even hardly mention this possibility could drive sysadmin crazy ;). Last moth Vladi Tchalkov gave a nice presentation on the subject on SofiaDev monthly meeting.

There is another resource on the subject - there is whole guide made by Patterns&Practice team in Microsoft -

Production Debugging for .NET Framework Applications

It could give some nice ideas how to troubleshoot issues in application in production environment.

Feature specifications are posted on MSDN so everyone who is interested how to write specifications or how looks like specifications inside Microsoft can take a look at Feature Specifications for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 in MSDN. All documents are in XPS format.

I've just read ScottGu's blog post  (from an hour ago) where he announces that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released  as well as many many links for info about new IDE version.

You can download (90-days free trial edition) of:

• Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite
• Team Foundation Server
• Visual Studio 2008 Express editions - absolutely free
• and, of course, .NET Framework 3.5 Redistributable

I guess MS bandwidth will be filled in next days ;)

If you've played with C# 3.0 and LINQ you might feel bored with good old .NET 2.0 projects. But wait! There is a way to use LINQ to Objects in .NET 2.0 projects. LINQBridge makes this possible. But how?

First, it's important to understand that C# 3.0 and Framework 3.5 are designed to work with CLR 2.0-the same CLR version that Framework 2.0 uses. This means that the C# 3.0 compiler emits IL code that runs on the same virtual machine as before.

This makes Framework 3.5 additive-just as Framework 3.0 was additive-comprising additional assemblies that enhance the existing 2.0 Framework and CLR. So there's nothing to stop us from writing our own assemblies that do the work of Framework 3.5 (at least, the critical bits required for local LINQ queries).

Can I use LINQBridge with C# 2.0 and Studio 2005?

You can-but the query operators will be awkward to use without lambda expressions, extension methods, query syntax, etc.

More info you can find at LINQBridge official page as well as source code. Thanks to Joe Albahari!

As we learned that we will be able to work on Visual Studio 2008 RTM starting from next month it is time to start providing useful resources and links :)

Here is poster with .NET 3.5 Namespaces (download PDF - 986 KB)

Also here is how technologies are added to .NET

via Brad Adams blog and Paul Andrew blog

Just read Marto Kulov's blog post:

Somasegar just announced that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 will be out this November.

This is awesome. I am looking forward using this VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 RTM.

Sounds somehow normal as last days blogging space has been very quite

MIXUK 07 recorded sessions are made public - you can see them at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/mix07/agenda.aspx 

Note: At Day 2 there are two sessions of ScottG that cannot be missed if you want to catch up with all fancy stuff that coming in VS 2008

And of course the videos are streamed through Sivlerlight video player... Did you expected somethig else :) And very conviniently you can download them in .zip format for offline view

On last Sofia.NET UG meeting were discussed also first and second chance exceptions which was new to me. Here is what MS Knowledge Base says on the subject:

"When an exception is raised, the handler may correct or ignore the condition rather than allow a failure to propagate up through intervening layers. This is very useful in complex environments such as networks where partial failures are expected and it is not desirable to fail an entire operation just because one of several optional parts failed. In this case, the exception can be handled so that the application does not recognize that an exception has occurred.

However, if the application is being debugged, the debugger sees all exceptions before the program does. This is the distinction between the first and second chance exception: the debugger gets the first chance to see the exception (hence the name). If the debugger allows the program execution to continue and does not handle the exception, the program will see the exception as usual. If the program does not handle the exception, the debugger gets a second chance to see the exception. In this latter case, the program normally would crash if the debugger were not present."

Yesterday we had regular Sofia.NET User Group meeting in Microsoft Bulgaria office. Vladimir Chalkov(C# MVP and CEO of Crossroad) gave a nice session about debugging apps on production server without making sysadmin crazy with installing Visual Studio. It wass helpful session that presented some hardcore skills :)

Thanks, Vladi.