Highly Recommended:

www.takeonit.com

"Every side to every story"

I'll be speaking at the upcoming JAOO in Sydney and Brisbane in May/June, on LINQ to SQL and PLINQ/Parallel FX. This is a terrific conference and a great opportunity to hear from a wide range of respected speakers. Don't miss out!

These newly released books are for people that want to eat their cake and have it. Despite their small size, they don't sacrifice readability or detail and are packed with useful and complete information on C# 3.0 and LINQ. These books, in fact, may be all you need to get up to speed with the C# language and LINQ! Find out more

The top-selling C# 3.0 in a Nutshell includes everything in the two pocket references, plus detailed coverage of the CLR and core .NET Framework. Its new format is radical departure from previous editions, providing much greater depth and readability. Find out more

Ever used SQL Management Studio and wished you could type your queries in LINQ, rather than antiquated SQL? Well now you can! LINQPad is a free tool that lets you dynamically query SQL databases in a real query language—you'll never have to struggle with a correlated subquery again!

Based on the Framework used in-house by my company, Egton:Lite provides a set of simple but powerful components for middle-tier development. This includes Egton Entities (think DataSets done right!) and Wafers - a framework for writing Windows Forms custom controls. Egton:Lite includes full source code, and is free!

Threading in C#  An extensive article on multithreading in C#. This tackles difficult issues such as thread safety, when to use Abort, Wait Handles vs Wait and Pulse, the implications of Apartment Threading in Windows Forms, using Thread Pooling, Synchronization Contexts, Memory Barriers and non-blocking synchronization constructs. Full Contents

Dynamically building LINQ expression predicates This describes a simple and elegant solution to the problem of dynamically composing Expression<> based predicates in LINQ.

Value Types vs Reference Types  A tutorial explaining how value and reference types work in C# and .NET. This covers the differences in the way objects are created and disposed, how memory allocation works, and common traps.

This simple and free database query tool written in C# allows SQL commands to be run interactively on SQL Server, Oracle or an OLE-DB compliant databases. It includes an object browser, text/grid results, saving to XML/CSV format, and support for batching via the 'GO' keyword. No installation required. Full source code available. More on Query Express...

For something more introductory, I highly recommend Head First C#: this is the most fun way to get started!

Insightful and critically acclaimed. Read the reviews!

Joseph Albahari
www.albahari.com