The new phone books are here, the new phone books are here...

Bill Sheldon — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:27:00 GMT

This is one of those 'hey look at me' posts that always make me feel like... well if you recognize the title of the movie that the quote which is the title of this movie comes from - that pretty much sums it up.

Anyway a few 'ads'.

First off, I have a new article available over at SQL Magazine. It's a very introductory article to LINQ for SQL so if you are looking for a good starting point for just getting started with LINQ, here's a short article that might be of assistance: http://www.sqlmag.com/Article/ArticleID/98205/sql_server_98205.html

The second item fits the post a bit better. Back in the first Quarter I signed on to do another book - yes my wife is ready to kill me - which since she is pregnant get's the pregnancy multiplier (we're currently around 7 or 8 so the danger level is getting pretty high). At any rate if you are interested it's still way out in the future - like October 2008 - if "we" (me) make "our" (my) final due date - here is the page: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0470377313/105-1544171-6096430

As you can note on that page this next book is an Office Business Applications book. Of note, it will have both C# and VB samples (ok VB sample - but more on that later) and covers using WPF with Outlook Form Regions and Excel not to mention server side document generation. That's the good news - the bad news - well I'm late on my chapters - of course that's pretty typical for me - the question is can I catch up in the next few weeks - especially given the increasing pregnancy multiplier...

Finally, I thought I should mention that my last book is finally getting read to be available. At 1600 pages it pretty much is a phone book, and it should ship for the first week of May which apparently is fast approaching: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Visual-Basic-2008-Evjen/dp/0470191368/ref=sr_1_1

LINQ Samples

Bill Sheldon — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:49:00 GMT

One of the items which came up at the MVP Summit involved the availability of VB Samples online. It's funny how sometimes you'll see the difference between those in Redmond and internal to Microsoft and those of us on the outside. In this case the response of the VB Team was effectively: "What are you talking about we ship samples along with each CTP, the C# team has their posted because they aren't all in the product." (Note I'm paraphrasing what I recall hearing here.)

Anyway the MVP's made it quite clear that from a perceptions standpoint the fact that the C# samples were easily available via the web while the VB samples were MIA was a problem. So the VB Team committed to making their samples available online. The result is that if you head over to the LINQ Samples page you’ll find both C# and VB Samples.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/bb330936.aspx

Which reminds me of a second link to LINQ - For those of you who are still getting up to speed you'll find alot of great introductory information related to LINQ at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/aa904594.aspx