C# 3.0 Overview

It's been forever since my last post. I promise I'll do better. I've just been juggling three jobs. ;) But that has changed (more on that soon)!

The last couple of nights I did the same talk at two different user groups. Sacramento .NET User's Group and the Central California .NET User's Group. Thank you guys for having me, and not throwing any tomatoes. I think we had a good time at both events. Though, I did take up the whole two hours both times.

The talk was based on Jon Skeet's upcoming book titled C# in Depth which I had the pleasure of reviewing and providing technical feedback. We went through the evolution of C# from 1.0 to 3.0, explored a bunch of the new features, played Human LINQ (hilarious). Oh yeah, it was pointed out to me in the Sacramento group that the word "jumped" should really be "jumps". That's what I get for copying my work! hah! If anybody in the Sacramento area wants to help, I'd like to do it again and video tape it...

Stuff to Download

• C# 3.0 Overview Presentation – In both talks I didn't have enough time to bore you guys with the "in depth" slides. Pick up Jon's book to learn the nitty gritty about how all that stuff works.
• A Sorted Affair 2 – - A few weeks ago I published the first version of this on my blog. This one is much cooler.
• Human LINQ – The code we executed with our Human LINQ provider.
• Sort Performance – A quick exploration of the relative sorting speeds using different sort methods.

I'll write up another quick blog in a bit on the sort performance. It's quite interesting, indeed.

A New Kind of Application Server

As you probably know, I'm a cofounder of Coversant which, at its heart, is an XMPP development platform. Most of our larger customers (thousands of simultaneous users) are ISV's that have built on the SoapBox Platform®. We allow you to easily develop XMPP applications using .NET technology.

A really long time ago, I wrote about some possibilities for using the SoapBox Platform including examples of what our customers were doing at the time. This was before there microblogging was popular, or I probably would have used that example too. :)

The last couple of weeks there seems to be quite a bit of buzz around the subject of using XMPP as an application server, and that gets me really excited! A friend/competitor Matt Tucker of Jive Software wrote in his company blog about how XMPP is the future for cloud services. A "real" online author (aka not a member of an XMPP company) even picked up Matt's article and ran with it. Yesterday, a little buzz hit Slashdot when another friend/competitor Mickael Raymond of Process One wrote about introducing the XMPP application server (when I wrote this, it seems Process One was experiencing a bit of the Slashdot effect -- hopefully by the time you read this it will be gone and you can read his article), which is an exploration of building a Twitter-like microblogging system on top of their XMPP server. Great stuff, indeed!

This is wonderful news and very validating for me personally! It seems after six years of committing to the infant technology, I wasn't crazy after all, and XMPP is a good platform for presence/messaging systems! And if you're in the market for .NET based XMPP solutions, head on over to the SoapBox Developer site. :)