Peter Johnson's Blog

MVC's IgnoreRoute syntax

I've had an excuse to mess around with custom route ignoring code in ASP.NET MVC, and am surprised how poorly the IgnoreRoute extension method on RouteCollection (technically RouteCollectionExtensions, but also RouteCollection.Add, and RouteCollection.Ignore which was added in .NET 4) is documented, both in the official docs by Microsoft, and various bloggers and forum participants who have been using it, some for years.

We all know these work. The first is in Microsoft code; it and the second are about the only examples out there:

routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
routes.Ignore("{*allaspx}", new {allaspx=@".*\.aspx(/.*)?"});

I understand the first ignores .axd requests regardless of what comes after the .axd part, and the second uses a regex custom constraint for more control over what's blocked. But why is pathInfo a special name that we don't have to define? What other special names could we use without defining? What does .* mean in a regex, if that really is a regex? . is exactly one instance, and * is zero or more instances, so putting them together doesn't make sense to me.

Phil Haack provides this equally syntactically confusing example to prevent favicon.ico requests from going through routing:

routes.IgnoreRoute("{*favicon}", new {favicon=@"(.*/)?favicon.ico(/.*)?"});

I also tried these in my code:

routes.IgnoreRoute("myroute");
routes.IgnoreRoute("myroute/{*pathInfo}");

The first with URL's that ended in /myroute, and /myroute/whatever, but not /myroute/whatever?stuff=23. The second blocked all three of those, but not /somethingelse?stuff=myroute. Why does this work without putting the constant "myroute" in {} like the resource.axd example above? Is resource really a constant in that example, or just a placeholder for which we could have used any name? Do string constants need curly brace delimiters in some cases and not others? An example I found on Steve Smith's blog and on others shows the same thing:

routes.IgnoreRoute("{Content}/{*pathInfo}");

This prevents any requests to the standard Content folder from going through routing. Why the curly braces?

Just to keep things interesting, when I tried to type my IgnoreRoute call above, I accidentally left out the slash:

routes.IgnoreRoute("myroute{*pathInfo}");

which threw "System.ArgumentException: A path segment that contains more than one section, such as a literal section or a parameter, cannot contain a catch-all parameter." OK, so no slash means more than one section, and including a slash means it's only one section?

SQL Server 2005/2008's TRY/CATCH and constraint error handling

I was thrilled that T-SQL finally got the TRY/CATCH construct that many object-oriented languages have had for ages. I had been writing error handling code like this:

BEGIN TRANSACTION TransactionName

...

-- Core of the script - 2 lines of error handling for every line of DDL code
ALTER TABLE dbo.MyChildTable DROP CONSTRAINT FK_MyChildTable_MyParentTableID
IF (@@ERROR <> 0)
    GOTO RollbackAndQuit

...

COMMIT TRANSACTION TransactionName
GOTO EndScript

-- Centralized error handling for the whole script
RollbackAndQuit:
    ROLLBACK TRANSACTION TransactionName
    RAISERROR('Error doing stuff on table MyChildTable.', 16, 1)

EndScript:

GO

...which gets pretty ugly when you have a script that does 5-10 or more such operations and it has to check for an error after every one. With TRY/CATCH, the above becomes:

Much cleaner in the body of the script; we have to do more work in the CATCH (wouldn't it be nice if T-SQL had a THROW statement like C# to rethrow the exact same error that was caught?), but the core of the script that makes DDL changes is cleaner and more readable. The only serious downside I've found so far is when dropping a constraint, and you get a message like this without TRY/CATCH:

(In this case I'd check for the constraint before trying to drop it; this is just for illustration. One I've seen more often is trying to drop a primary key and recreate it on a parent table when there are foreign keys on child tables that reference the parent.)

TRY/CATCH shortens the above error to only "Could not drop constraint. See previous errors." with no previous errors shown. Now, some research will reveal why it couldn't drop the constraint, but TRY/CATCH is supposed to make error handling easier and more straightforward, not more obscure. The "See previous errors" line has always struck me as a lazy error message--I bet there's a story amongst seasoned SQL Server developers at Microsoft as to why this throws two error messages instead of one--so I imagine the real problem is in that dual error message more than the TRY/CATCH construct itself as it's implemented in T-SQL.

If anyone has a slick way to get that initial Msg 3728 part of the error, I'm all ears; I've seen several folks ask this question and not one answer yet.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I wish were more intuitive

I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow.

Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good.

Workflow Activity Library project type - What's the point of this separate project type? So far I don't see much advantage to keeping your custom activities in a separate project. I prefer to have as few projects as needed (and no fewer). The Designer's Toolbox window seems to find your custom activities just fine no matter where they are, and the debugging experience doesn't seem to be any different.

Designer Properties - This is about the designer, and not specific to WF, but nevertheless something that's hindered me a lot more in WF than in Windows Forms or elsewhere. The Properties window does a good job of showing you property values when you hover the mouse over the values. But they don't do the same to find out what a control's type is. So maybe if I named all my activities "x1" and "x2" instead of helpful self-documenting names like "listenForStatusUpdate", then I could easily see enough of the type to determine what it is, but any names longer than those and all I get of the type is "System.Workflow.Act" or "System.Workflow.Compone". Even hitting the dropdown doesn't expand any wider, like the debugger quick watch "smart tag" popups do when you scroll through members. The only way I've found around this in VS 2008 is to widen the Properties dialog, losing precious designer real estate, then shrink it back down when you're done to see what you were doing. Really?

WF Designer - This is about the designer, and I believe is specific to WF. I should be able to edit the XML in a .xoml file, or drag and drop using the designer. With WPF (at least in VS 2010 Ultimate), these are side by side, and changes to one instantly update the other. With WF, I have to right-click on the .xoml file, choose Open With, and pick XML Editor to edit the text. It looks like this is one way where WF didn't get the same attention WPF got during .NET Fx 3.0 development.

Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.).

ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event, but creating the EventArgs by passing in null for the sender parameter--if you pass in this, as one normally does when firing events, for some reason the HandleExternalEventActivity won't see that the event has fired. Then you need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds.

TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error:

...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it.

I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

Migrating from VS 2005 to VS 2008

I recently helped migrate a ton of code from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008, and .NET 2.0 to 3.5. Most of it went very smoothly; it touches every .sln, .csproj, and .Designer.cs file, and puts a bunch of junk in Web.Configs, but rarely encountered errors. One thing I didn't expect was that even for a project running in VS 2008 but targeting .NET Framework 2.0, it will still use the v3.5 C# compiler. As such, it does behave a bit differently than the 2.0 compiler, even when targeting the 2.0 Framework.

One piece of code used an internal custom EventArgs class, that was consumed via a public delegate. This code compiled fine using the 2.0 C# compiler, but the 3.5 compiler threw this error:

It's a goofy situation, the error makes perfect sense, and it was easy to correct (I made both internal), but I expected VS 2008 would use the compiler to match whatever the target .NET Framework version was. I wouldn't have expected any compilation errors it didn't have before conversion, not until I changed the targeted Framework version.

Another funny error happened around code analysis. Code analysis ran fine in VS 2005, but in VS 2008, it threw this error (compilation error, not a code analysis warning):

I especially like the "See output window for details," which 1. screams of a Visual Studio hack as it is, and 2. doesn't actually give me any more details in this particular case, though Google tells me that other people do get more information in the output window.

I noticed Debug and Release modes both had code analysis enabled (I think switching Framework versions swapped them on me and I accidentally enabled it in Release mode), and Release mode wasn't erroring out but Debug was. I looked at the difference in the csproj file, and in the FxCopCmd.exe calls, and the key seemed to be the /ruleid parameters (bolded), of which there were a ton in Debug but not Release. Presumably this is because I disabled some of the rules in the project properties, so I tried enabling them all. The number of /ruleid params went down, but it still gave the same error. The Code Analysis tab in project properties looked the same between Debug and Release.

Finally I unloaded the project, edited the csproj file (I'm glad I found out how to do this within VS, instead of exiting VS and editing it in Notepad), and removed this line, which was present in the Debug PropertyGroup element but not the Release one:

<CodeAnalysisRules>-Microsoft.Design#CA1012;-Microsoft.Design#CA2210...</CodeAnalysisRules>

Code analysis then ran successfully. I imagine this solution isn't ideal for everyone, if you want to enable/disable particular rules, and it's not ideal for us long-term, but it did allow us to keep code analysis enabled without the build failing.

Windows 7 rocks!

I bought my current PC almost three years ago. I've had my own PC for 15 years or so, and, aside from my first desktop and a laptop I only use when traveling, that was the only time I've bought a whole PC, rather than buying parts and assembling my own (a Frankenputer as former coworkers affectionately referred to them). Like many of my colleagues who work in Microsoft technologies, I looked into buying a Dell, and they had a fine deal, and more importantly, they had finally started selling AMD processors, which I can proudly say without qualification is the only CPU in any computer I've owned. I configured one with a dual core, 64-bit processor, and all sorts of new technologies I'd never heard of but were (and appear to still be) the latest and the greatest. ("What's SATA? We use PCI for video again?" I asked myself.)

Windows Vista had RTM'd and was weeks from retail availability, and my PC included a deal to upgrade once Microsoft let Dell send upgrade discs. My PC had a rather small (160 GB, I think) hard drive, which I intended to replace with a 500 GB or so once Vista came out, installing it there fresh instead of trying to upgrade Windows--Windows upgrades have never worked so well for me, whereas fresh installs are fine. Then I heard all the complaining about Vista, and decided to hold off. I ran low on space before Vista SP1 came out, so got that second hard drive anyway and kept my photos there. From then on, Windows XP Professional worked "well enough" so I stuck with it.

Things got bad a couple months before Windows 7 came out. First, Norton AntiVirus misbehaved. To be fair, the program was about 6-7 years old; I kept it around because it seemed to work well enough, I got it free as a student, and virus definition upgrades were free. Then I noticed the dates on the definitions went from a few days ago, to the middle of 1999. It still changed every week, and still found upgrades, so I'm guessing it was just a bug in how it displayed the definitions date, but still made me nervous, as did the prospect of uninstalling old and installing new virus scanners.

Roxio was the next to act up. After Microsoft paved the way with Windows Update, suddenly every software manufacturer was convinced their product was just as important to check at least every week for updates, and the updates, just as urgent. Eventually I got Apple to quit bugging me to install Bonjour and Safari, but I couldn't get Roxio (or, perhaps more accurately, InstallShield Update Manager which came with Roxio) to quit prompting me to check for updates on the 0 products I had told it to check. I googled and finally found a tool I could use to uninstall that piece of it, without uninstalling Roxio, on InstallShield's support site.

That was a mistake. It stopped prompting me, but added about 3 minutes from when Windows comes up after I start my PC, until my computer was usable, and in the meantime, Norton was disabled, Windows Firewall was disabled, and programs wouldn't start. Add to this a nagging problem where my SD/CompactFlash card reader thinks it's USB 1.x intermittently, and the ugly way Windows Search was grafted onto Windows XP, and the fact that XP (and earlier versions of Windows--not sure about 7 yet) just slows down after a couple years, and I knew it was time to upgrade once Windows 7 came out.

The more I learned about Windows 7 (and, to be fair, much of it was new in Vista and largely unchanged in 7, but I'd barely ever used Vista), the more I liked it. The way search worked much faster, more efficiently, and was integrated into everything, even the Start Menu (no more reorganizing each program's 20 or so icons so I could find the ones I actually wanted! no more sorting alphabetically every time I install a new program!)... An overhauled Windows Explorer including a new Libraries feature (not in Vista) that didn't force you to keep everything in your profile for Windows to like it... and finally getting to install 4 GB of memory and take advantage of my 64-bit processor!

After Microsoft decided one day the long-activated Windows XP installation on my laptop was no longer valid, with no explanation why, I wasn't going to chance them deciding the same thing on my main PC, so I broke down and got the full version of Windows 7. I opted for Home Premium after finding little difference between Home Premium and Professional that I cared about, since Home Premium should be able to run IIS, and if it can't, Visual Studio 2008's web server should be enough for what I need on this PC. I installed it not quite a month ago, replacing NAV and Ad-Aware with the new free and highly-rated Microsoft Security Essentials, and Roxio with--well, either what's built into Windows 7 or my favorite CD ripper Easy CD-DA Extractor, and it's great. I can work the way I want to, customize things as much as I need (you're close, iPhone, but not quite there), and boy is Aero pretty. I'm a sucker for eye candy (I do have an iPhone).

The search works great. I was leery about using Windows Search (installed against your will by Office 2007) or Google Desktop Search (must be unchecked in order to not install with every Adobe program and tons of others) add-ons for Windows XP; that sort of thing just seems like too core a functionality to get some freebie add-on to handle. Windows XP's built-in search might suck, but it usually found what I wanted, and didn't take too long. Sure enough, Windows 7 search works instantly, and if you copy over a ton of files it hasn't indexed, as I did when I wiped my hard drive to install 7 then copied back from my backup, it might not find everything right away, but it will after it spends a few minutes indexing them. And, as advertised, it doesn't slow me down while I'm using the PC; I haven't heard my hard drive crank once while I've been writing this long post. By default, it only indexes in your Libraries, and MS suggests anything you want indexed, you put in a Library. That put me off at first--what if I need to search for a system file or something?--but really, the vast majority of stuff I search for slots fine in either the Documents, Music, or Pictures Libraries. Moving from XP to 7 takes some adjustment, but I gave it a chance, and I'm quite happy with it. And if I do ever need to do a search for a certain DLL, it's easy enough to add folders to the list of what's indexed. I don't even have to dig into Administrative Tools and various Control Panel applets and System Tools folders, wondering where Microsoft has hidden that options screen in this version, thanks to the Start Menu search feature. I just click the Windows key, type "index", and it's the first option:

Just like searching on the web, the content is what matters; its physical location is now much less important. You just type in a word or two and it figures out what you want, no matter where it is.

Another great and long-overdue improvement is the Windows Explorer dialogs for long-running file operations--deleting, copying, moving. It gives you more of the path, and best of all, an accurate estimate of how long it will take, and the rate at which it's copying files! No more operations where it takes 45 seconds for the first part and 23987105 minutes for the last part.

The most annoying thing I've found so far is based on principle, and not any difference I've observed. Occasionally, programs crash. Two that I use often, Mozilla Firefox and IrfanView, have each crashed once. (Amusingly, both when they tried to start up the Apple QuickTime plug-in; I have a few things to say about my iTunes migration experience, but that'll have to wait for another post.) But once is all it takes in Windows 7, before Program Compatibility Assistant (PCA) kicks in and applies some sort of mysterious sanctions to the offender.

Obviously I was curious about what those "settings" it applied were, and how to grant amnesty for first-time offenses. That link has a help article with those exact questions. And the answer? "It depends," and "go to TechNet and teach yourself about group policy," respectively. (In their words, "Adjustments to program compatibility features can be made by using Group Policy. For advanced information on how to use Group Policy, go to the Microsoft website for IT professionals.") Seriously? A little more googling and I found out that you can dig into it, or disable PCA altogether, using Group Policy Editor, which... doesn't come with Home Premium. So it sounds like my only choice is manually editing the registry. I can't even find out what PCA changed about how those programs run; a few articles allude to ominous performance degradations in order to ensure stability. Windows 7 addresses so many things that bugged me about XP and earlier versions; it's a shame they dropped the ball on this one. To be fair, it seems that this is how Vista functioned, and Windows 7 didn't make it worse, but didn't improve it, either.

But, to summarize, I'm thrilled with Windows 7, and with 64-bit computing, though I'm a little surprised more programs aren't 64-bit (Firefox and Flash Player, I'm looking at you). Oh well--we had the same problem switching from 16-bit to 32-bit, but I'm glad enough software and hardware is there, that I can upgrade and work just fine until the rest of it makes it.

TFS deleted files still show up in Source Control Explorer

One problem I've had in Team Foundation Server since Visual Studio 2005 and still in VS 2008 is when items are deleted by someone else, they still show up in Source Control Explorer, with a gray folder with a red X icon, even with "Show deleted items in the Source Control Explorer" unchecked in VS's Options dialog. Sometimes getting latest of the parent clears things up, but other times it doesn't, even with Get Specific Version with both Overwrite boxes checked to force a get. In this case, the only option I've found is to delete my workspace and recreate it, which means checking in everything beforehand, and getting latest of my working branches afterwards. It's a pain, but as specified here and approved by a Microsoft employee, that may be your only option until it's fixed--fingers crossed for VS 2010. (We won't get into the other things for which my fingers have been crossed since I first used TFS in 2005, things that VSS did just fine, such as rollback, check in changes and keep checked out, and search.)

Anyone have any better solutions? Deleting and recreating your workspace seems a bit drastic.

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 released, with Go Live

It's official! In one of the first of a few dozen posts you'll read about it, Scott Guthrie announces Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 have been released.

Microsoft Sandcastle

In working with my company's offshore developers, I was tasked with providing them documentation on a set of class libraries we use in our applications. In the .NET 1.0/1.1 time frame, we used NDoc, which, sadly, passed away last year, to turn the XML comments output by the C# compiler into CHM help files. After a bit of googling and a false start, I discovered Sandcastle, which Microsoft uses to build the .NET Framework documentation itself. I also discovered from the Sandcastle blog that it takes a whole mess of manual steps to use, which appeared daunting at first glance, and, being a programmer, I was looking for an easier (lazier) way.

From the official Sandcastle download page, I found the Sandcastle Wiki, and from there, an NDoc-like, Visual Studio-like GUI for it creatively titled Sandcastle Help File Builder. Setting up a SHFB project and getting the documentation to compile, and then to look/behave almost exactly like I envisioned, was simple at this point.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed how easy it was to discover this and find resources to use it--a lot easier than it used to be to fill a component/tool need that Microsoft claims to address (some of the data access pieces in the Visual InterDev 6.0 time frame come to mind). Really, the hardest part was getting the Google terms right!

Again, you can download Sandcastle here. The latest version is the June 2007 CTP (Community Technology Preview, which you probably already know means it's pre-release), released a couple weeks ago.

HTTP modules - subdirectories and private variables

I recently finished (for now--there's always more to do) one of the more complex HTTP modules I've worked on. I have an application first written in the ASP.NET 1.0 beta 2 time frame that's since been upgraded to 1.0, 1.1, and now 2.0. It had a lot of custom authentication and error handling code in global.asax, and for general architecture and server management purposes, I wanted to move this code into separate HTTP modules. I ran into a couple gotchas I wanted to document.

Lesson 1: You can't disable an HTTP module for a subdirectory. I wanted to remove the HTTP module for one subdirectory using the <location> configuration element, and while it let me put it in my web.config fine and never threw an error a la "It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level.  This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.", when I ran it, it went into the module's code as if that config section wasn't there.

Scott Guthrie explained to me why: "HttpModules are application specific. When an application starts up, a number of HttpApplication's get configured (one for each logical thread that will execute in the application), and HttpModules are created and assigned to them. That is why you need to configure them at the application root (or higher) level in config. This enables much better pooling of resources." He pointed out that other HTTP modules in ASP.NET handle this with custom configuration sections, which is more work than I was looking at doing for this release.

An exception to this rule is if that subdirectory itself is configured as an IIS application, but in many cases (including mine), this is more trouble than it's worth, limiting what user controls it can see, requiring its own bin directory... and if you're going to do all that, it's probably going to need its own web.config file anyway.

Lesson 2: You shouldn't use private member variables in an HTTP module. I've been an ASP.NET programmer long enough that I thought I could figure out whether member variables were safe or not. I could argue for it either way, and I wasn't feeling ambitious enough to wade through all that code in Reflector. I finally found official documentation for the HttpApplication class that said, "One instance of the HttpApplication class is used to process many requests in its lifetime; however, it can process only one request at a time. Thus, member variables can be used to store per-request data." So it made sense that if an HTTP module is wired to a particular HttpApplication instance, the same rule would apply, and member variables would be safe in HTTP modules as well.

Again,  Scott helped me out by advising me against member variables: "If you have an async operation occur during the request, I believe ASP.NET might switch the HttpModule to another thread to execute. That is my worry with storing local variables. It might work in your dev environment, but generate different results under high-load on a server." And no one needs any more "works great in dev and QA but not production" sorts of issues. He advised storing such things in HttpContext.Items instead, but in my case, the data was so cheap to calculate and consumed rarely enough that I decided to just have a method to calculate it every time. Interestingly, by switching from global.asax (where member variables were fine) to an HTTP module, I took a step back in this department, but overall it was the right move and the way I would have written the app from the beginning had I been more familiar and experienced with ASP.NET.

ASPInsiders Summit 2006 - C# 3.0 and LINQ

C# 3.0 (not to be confused with the confusingly-named .NET Framework 3.0, which includes C# 2.0, not C# 3.0) was the most exciting thing discussed at the ASPInsiders Summit. When I first learned a bit about LINQ at the 2005 summit, I didn't really get what was so great about taking some mangled SQL syntax and duct-taping it onto the language. Given a few hours for Anders Hejlsberg, the lead architect of C#, to explain LINQ, how it came to be, how it works behind the scenes, and why it's a Good Thing, I changed my mind. He and Scott Guthrie sold me on LINQ (at least, as much as I could be until it's released and I can play with it first-hand).

Most of the big changes in C# 3.0 were driven by LINQ, which is why I'm talking about them in conjunction. But this doesn't mean they're LINQ-specific; I can think of a ton of cases independent of LINQ where this stuff will be useful. It reminds me of when "XML web services" was repeated in every lecture, article, blog post, knowledge base article, and whitepaper from Microsoft that talked about the .NET Framework when it first came out, as if that was the main thing anyone would use the framework for. Though I've done a ton of .NET programming, I think maybe 1% of has had anything to do with web services. Thankfully, only few seem to have been fooled by that and adoption took off anyway.

But back to C# 3.0's new features. These are explained in more depth and with more examples on the LINQ Project site, so check out the overview there for more information--no need for me to duplicate all that.

Local variable type inference (or, "No, it's OK, the var keyword isn't evil anymore"). Former ASP programmers like me instinctively shudder when we see the keyword "var", and recoil a bit when we hear it's being introduced to C#. But this has nothing to do with late binding or strong typing--this is just something to allow programmers to be just a little lazier. The basic idea is if you have a long type like Dictionary<int, MyCoolButLongType> you're newing up on the right, you don't have to type all that on the left since the compiler already knows what type it is.

int i = 5;
Dictionary<int, Order> orders = new Dictionary<int, Order>();

is 100% equivalent to:

var i = 5;
var orders = new Dictionary<int, Order>();

The variable orders still has the same type of Dictionary<int, Order> it does in the first example. It'll still behave the same as it did, you'll still get the same Visual Studio IntelliSense you did, and the IL will be the same. Var is not variant here--it's "I'm lazy so let the compiler figure it out."

Extension methods. This allows you to "add" your own methods to types you can't otherwise change yourself, e.g. in the .NET Framework or third-party libraries. So if you've always wanted a string.FooBar() method, just write it as an extension method, include its namespace, and you've got your string.FooBar() method. Everyone's got a pet peeve this can address--some method they wish the framework provided, a string or numeric operation. Now it's yours, whatever you want, however you want it to work.

Lambda expressions. This is another feature for laziness/concision, making it easier to write a function inline than you could with C# 2.0's anonymous methods.

List<Customer> customers = GetCustomerList();
List<Customer> locals = customers.FindAll(c => c.State == "KY");

reads as "Find all c such that c.State equals Kentucky". The compiler infers that the return type of this lambda expression is boolean, due to the comparison operator ==.

Object initializers. This is one of the (few) good things about VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), the version of VB included with the Microsoft Office products and a platform on which I unfortunately found myself doing a lot programming several years ago. Using the new keyword to create an instance of an object, you can now specify initial values for public properties and fields.

Person value = new Person { Name = "Chris Smith", Age = 31 };

creates a new Person instance, setting its Person.Name and Person.Age properties.

Query expressions. This is what LINQ looks like on the surface. An example statement using a query expression on the right side:

var customerQuery = from c in customers
where c.State == "WA"
select new {c.Name, c.Phone};

where customers is a custom collection, like List<Customer>. One of the biggest questions I had is why in the world they took the SQL SELECT..FROM..WHERE syntax we all know and "love" and jumbled it up. Fortunately, Anders addressed this, saying Microsoft considered implementing LINQ syntax it in the same order as SQL, but really, SQL doesn't make sense. When you execute a SQL query, it starts with FROM and WHERE (table/index scans), then goes to SELECT, just like these query expressions in C#. C# doing it this way both helps get IntelliSense and is more forward-looking (what makes sense if we were designing this from scratch, and giving ourselves the option to expand it later) than backward-looking (how's it been done before; what are people used to). It looks weird the first time to those of us used to seeing SQL, but it makes sense after you get past that hump.

Expression trees. The .NET Framework (and C#) will have expression trees and expression parsing built in. So for example, you can give it a string, and it will build a tree of Expression objects behind the scenes to represent it. Anyone who's written their own search or query syntax can imagine how powerful this could be.

So look again at the above query expression. The C# compiler rewrites it as:

var customerQuery = customers.Where(c => c.State == “WA”).Select(c => new {c.Name, c.Phone});

Now you can see how all this begins to tie together: A query expression gets expanded into a more verbose and less readable statement using extension methods (List<Customer> doesn't have a native Where method) and lambda expressions. The lambda expressions get parsed into expression trees and return anonymous types (the return value of the Select lambda expression). We reference the results of the query expression with a local variable using type inference (we can't determine the return type of the query expression, and with type inference it doesn't matter--nevertheless it's still strongly typed). It's the circle of life!

Hopefully I'm explaining this clear enough that some of you can understand why at this point I was getting very impressed. Keep in mind all this compiler magic doesn't come at any efficiency/performance hit at runtime.

In case this syntax isn't enough to sell you on LINQ, here are a few more objective reasons. With just ADO.NET today, you have queries as quoted strings, parameters loosely bound, and results loosely typed, and the compiler can't help check code; LINQ helps in that classes describe data, the query is natural part of the language instead of a string, and the compiler provides IntelliSense and compile-time checking--it's entirely strongly typed in C# and VB. Another reason is that LINQ can be used to query against objects, DataSets, SQL data sources, XML out of the box using an extensible provider-driven model like those you find in .NET 2.0 today. And it has paging built-in, not specific to SQL Server.

Again, check out the LINQ Project Overview if you want more information, including a more detailed look at the features I mentioned and a few I skipped over.