these days I’m just playing around with Visual studio 2008 and its new features, C# 3.0 LINQ, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, ASP.Net 3.5 and much more. And trust me last few months, I have received a lot of emails regarding How to’s of these and requesting resources to learn these language improvements. well may be you wonder why I get these requests while there are a lot of geek’s outs there.. well trust me I do have some fans!!.

so I decided to help them all out, but I don’t want to fill the blogsphere with another post of LINQ, WPF or WCF, because its already filled with a lot of articles on them by geek’s and various people around the world.so what I’m going to do is post some valuable links on where you can give a kick start on learning these.

1. To get visual studio 2008 read the post here.
2. The first and best place I would recommend to learn is reading Scott Guthrie’s web blog. he had written some excellent articles on these new technologies. I would recommend you to subscribe his blogs feeds or book marking his blog for future reference. here is are some valuable articles by him.
   1. Using LINQ with ASP.Net in VS 2008.
   2. Scott Guthrie – First Look at ORCAS.
   3. New “ORCAS” C# 3.0 Language Features: Automatic Properties, Object Initializers and Collection Initializers.
   4. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Extension Methods.
   5. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Lambda Expressions.
   6. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Query Syntax.
   7. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Anonymous Types.
   8. and the following are Scott’s posts on LINQ
      • • Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL
        • Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes
        • Part 3: Querying our Database
        • Part 4: Updating our Database
        • Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control
        • Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures
        • Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures
        • Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions
        • Part 9: Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the Control
3. Another Place to Learn About LINQ is LINQ in Action . this site with its popularity has been written as a book also for more information visit here.
4. And now for WPF. here are the web sites which helped me to build my WPF knowledge.
   1. Windows Client official web site WPF Video Tutorials
   2. The Content Presenter
   3. The WPF Blog
5. And so far to lean Silverlight would recommend the official Silverlight web site.
6. and below are some more links which you might be interested in:
   1. Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ)
   2. ASP.Net 3.5 Video Tutorials.
   3. 101 LINQ Samples.
   4. Xceed WPF Data Grid Component -Free full Version (1 Developer Licence ).
7. And finally The Official Visual studio 2008 training kit by Microsoft

Well These are the sites which I visit often to learn about these new technologies. I’m just sharing these with you to make it easy to find about these and learn them easily without spending much time to search for these.

I hope it helped you, Enjoy!!.

Aneef Fashir (37 Posts)

Software Architect @ Assette, Sri Lanka