Scott Dorman

Following last years post of people at MVP Summit 2009 on Twitter, I’m getting a bit of a head start and using the new Twitter Lists feature to create a list of all Microsoft MVPs that I know (or know of). I’ve started this list with the same people from last years blog post. The plan is for this list to be a complete list (or at least as complete as I can make it) of Microsoft MVPs. If you are an MVP and want to be included or if you know of any MVPs that should be included, please let me know. (If you are on the list and are no longer an MVP or don’t want to be included, please let me know as well and I’ll remove you.)

Woke up this morning to an email letting me know that I’ve been renewed as an MVP in C# again this year! Almost didn’t see it as my junk mail filters kicked in and delivered it to my junk folder. Need to fix those rules. :) This makes the third year in a row that I’ve been an MVP. It seems like it was just yesterday when I received that first email.

The last year (especially the last half) has been very busy working on the book and my blogging and discussion board activity have slowed down a lot. As soon as the book is done I’ll be back to a more normal “schedule.” Thanks for everyone’s patience waiting for more blog posts and the book!

I wasn’t able to go to PDC09 this year, but Channel 9 has made most of the content from the sessions and keynotes available. If you want to download all of the content easily, you need to follow these simple steps:

1. Download a recent build of of cURL (~250K) and extract it to a folder.
2. Download PDC09Downloader and extract the .bat file to the same folder you extracted cURL.
3. Run PDC09Downloader from a command prompt. This batch file takes a single parameter, which indicates the file type you want to download. The possible values are:
   • WMVHIGH
   • WMV
   • MP4
   • PPTX
4. Download PDC09Renamer and extract the .bat file to the same folder as the downloaded content files.
5. Run PDC09Renamer from a command prompt to rename the files to the full session title. This batch file accepts the following parameter values:
   • WMV
   • MP4
   • PPTX

I have previously mentioned that I’m working on the upcoming Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2010 in 24 Hours book.

Things are progressing nicely, if a bit slower than I’d prefer. I have the draft for the cover art, which looks really good.

I’m also very pleased to announce my technical editors – Claudio Lasaala and Eric Lippert.

Claudio is a Senior Developer at EPS Software Corp. He has presented several lectures at Microsoft events such as PDC and various other Microsoft seminars, as well as several conferences and user groups across North America and Brazil. He is a multiple winner of the Microsoft MVP Award and also holds the MCSD for .NET certification. He has articles published on several magazines, such as MSDN Brazil Magazine, CoDe Magazine, UTMag, Developers Magazine, and FoxPro Advisor.

Eric is a senior software design engineer at Microsoft has been working full time in the developer division since 1996, where he assisted with the design and implementation of VBScript, JScript, JScript.NET, Windows Script Host, Visual Studio Tools for Office and C#.

I am looking forward to working with both Claudio and Eric through the technical editing process and getting this book completed and available, which should happen sometime early in 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for MSDN subscribers, and generally available on October 21. I haven’t had a chance yet to play around with it, but some of the CLR changes that are very exciting to hear about are:

• The new String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method indicates whether a string is null, empty, or consists only of white-space characters.
• New overloads have been added to the String.Concat and String.Join methods that concatenate members of an IEnumerable<T> collections.
• The String.Concat<T> method lets you concatenate each element in an enumerable collection without first converting the elements to strings.
• The new Enum.HasFlag method determines whether one or more bit fields or flags are set in an enumeration value.
• The Enum.TryParse<TEnum> method returns a Boolean value that indicates whether a string or integer value could be successfully parsed.
• You can now easily copy one stream into another with the CopyTo method in classes that inherit from the System.IO.Stream class.
• New Path.Combine method overloads enable you to combine file paths.
• You can now parse System.Guid structures.
• The new Microsoft.Win32.RegistryOptions enumeration lets you specify a volatile registry key that does not persist after the computer restarts.
• Registry keys no longer are restricted to a maximum length of 255 characters.

I’m really looking forward to these improvements, particularly Enum.HasFlags, Enum.TryParse, String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace, Guid.TryParse, and Path.Combine(string[]). Of course, since some of these weren’t in Beta 1 (at least as far as I saw), it means revising some of the chapters for my book.