1 Hour Coder

I spent a solid 2 hours (and an equal number of benjamins) on some books I bought today, hedging my bets on a well-reviewed book, Linq in Action.  I can agree with the other reviews I’ve seen, it really is a great book to start picking up Linq and some of the newer concepts in 3.0/3.5 … and I learned that you can even use Linq in VS2008 while targeting 2.0.  That would’ve been good to know on a project I’m finishing up.

Time Spent: roughly 2 hours
Net gain: learned about Linq basics, extension methods, lambda expressions, and how lambda expressions work using anonymous delegates.  Also learned basics of Linq to XML and Linq to SQL.
Repeat This Approach? Hell yes, this was time well spent.
Sources: Linq in Action, one book.

I started learning about 2008 the same place any good developer worth her/his salt would start: the help files.  Not only do I have the conquerable challenge of re-acquainting myself with C#, but a sizable one beyond that, learning about the new stuff: lambda exprs, extension methods, etc.

Everything has its place, and naturally most of the new functionality revolves around being able to implement ideas like LINQ and so on.  Other tidbits like setting up objects without constructors rocks like Whitesnake, as well as automatic get/set building properties.  Good to remember on the latter: if you need attributes on a property, you need to use the LEGACY (yeah, I said it) approach to building a property.  I also perused some good links, albeit not for beginners, on lambda expressions and LINQ in general, which I’ll have to update in the evening.

Time spent: about 40 minutes
Net gain: scratched the surface of some conceptual items, able to dive into easier features, nothing useful
Repeat this approach?  Yeah, gotta start somewhere, but maybe with different sources.
Sources:
- MSDN online
- Links below

So I got VS2008 installed (yes, behind the times) and created a C# windows app. Main came up, but when I opened the form designer I got an error:

“The service Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.ISelectionContainer already exists in the service container. Parameter name: serviceType”.

Sure, why the hell not. I actually reverse-snorted out loud, it was that funny (if only instantaneously). Found some hotfixes here.

Need to restart, then take a break for a bit.  Next, I’ll be playing with some of the newer features of 3.5 and see what all the hubbub’s about.

Update: had to apply a hotfix, reboot, apply another hotfix, reboot again.  It also took care of a linker error that I briefly saw.

So I upgraded to v2.5 of WordPress, and now I’m going to shift over to my martial arts websites… but I’m just about ready to begin the learning.  Putting it off much longer isn’t in my interests, so I’ll probably start out with an ASP.net 2.0 refresher tomorrow.

A great question was posed: why blog this?  Hell, no one is really going to read it anyway.   It’s mostly for me, something extra to ensure I follow through with the experiment.  If it doesn’t work, I can always blow it away and let the DNS expire into the internet cloud.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging away.  I’m finishing up some video for my company, and that takes a lot of CPU and diskspace.  On my 500+ GB RAID0+1 setup I’m down to 2 GB free, dammit.  So, it basically means I can’t fart around with VS 2008, which is where I’m going to start.  I think I’ll start by going after the new features of 2008: LINQ, extension stuff, and so on.  It seems like a reasonable place to begin.

I want to try dedicating up to 60 minutes in an evening to discover something I didn’t know about in the field of programming.  I have so many other things going on (my wonderful wife and kids, my small business, my day job, overtime, exercise) that I find I have no time left for keeping up on things.  
Well, if I could lay off the damn games for a while…
Anyway, I’m going to try to learn something new in 60 minutes or so, thus truly bending the title of the blog, but nonetheless get something done.  It may take multiple “sessions”, but if I get good at this, maybe it’ll turn into something smarter.

This is the beginning of what I hope is an interesting project.  Hopefully, this will benefit others in some fashion, but that isn’t my goal — it’s all about me.  So the first thing I need to do is come up with some valid study points.  Here’s what I would like to improve upon, in general:

•  ASP.NET 2.0
• WF, WCF (I already have a little start here)
• Design patterns (non-distributed for now, keep it easy)
• LINQ, other .Net 3.5 topics
• Third-party packages (LinqToSql, JQuery, etc) that seem cool
• Test-driven development (want to learn the hardcore definition and why it has a high adoption rate)

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m tired.  I’ll add to this if I think of others.