Brennan’s Blog

The .NET 3.5 is coming fast. I have not really been terribly excited about it until this past week. I am starting to see things that are very interesting. I am already trying out LINQ with the CTP. The 3.5 release will be much more significant than the 3.0 release which essentially was just an augmentation of the framework. The 3.5 release will update the runtime and the compiler to support the new language features for C# and VB.NET.

To help you get your head around it you can could read this blog entry on .NET 3.5 which includes a diagram that lays out all of the changes. And to get a jump start on LINQ you can get into Blinq. You can simply point Blinq at a database and it will generate a new website with all of the code you need to update the data. The generated code is very useful as training material.

To immerse yourself completely in .NET 3.5 you can download and install Visual Studio "Orcas" which is currently marked as Beta 1. You can expect that there will be a Beta 2 as usual which will soon be followed by the final release by November. I would hope that the Beta 2 release comes within the next month or two.