I have previously stated my reservations regarding Extensions methods, however this Eli Lopian's post still makes a good read.

Those of you who have an MSDN subscription should be able to get WinXP SP3 by navigating to the "Top Subscriber Downloads" part of the MSDN home page (scroll at the bottom).

The link is labelled Windows XP Service Pack 3 (x86) - CD (English)

Update: It's worth noting that if for some reason you don't want Windows Update to install WinXP SP3 automatically, you can block it.

So you know how the actual CLR hasn't changed since .NET 2.0? That is not entirely true (i.e. the one for Vista is a different build number), especially when you consider the .NET 3.5 release. The cut a long story short, Microsoft has taken the opportunity to include a service pack for the .NET CLR 2.0, which is a great thing as we are getting fixes for some annoying bugs.

One of the changes in SP1 of the CLR is the increase of the max number of threads per CPU that the .NET ThreadPool supports. It used to be 25 per CPU and the number has now increased to 250. Richard Blewett points out how this could be a potential gotcha as more threads means more memory consumed and ... well read the post! It's something not very likely to happen, but definitely worth knowing about. Plus, he talks about what brought this change, which is always interesting to know.

A co-worker came across this error today

 

Looks like someone went live with an update to the source code and forgot to deploy some of the referenced DLLs.

BTW remote debugging is enabled ... uncool MS, uncool! 

It was a fun week, despite hating myself for eating so much. Thankfully I missed the "free ice cream" session break and I can still fit into some of my clothes.

There were more than enough sessions to choose from and I often found myself not knowing which one to go to first. I decided that I didn't want to attend any "overview" sessions, the kind that just gave a high level view of some feature or technology. I can get that kind of information on MSDN or some code example, I don't need to fly to Barcelona and have some expert present to me a "Hello world" application. With this in mind I went to sessions on the following techonologies

• Silverlight (advanced topics; one of the sessions was a big mistake though)
• ASP.NET (performance & scalability, hidden gems, asyncronous processing, MVC Framework)
• SQL Server Reporting Services (parameters can be used for more than just filtering results)
• Security (concepts and principles; wish it went a bit more in depth)
• SQL Server 2005 (putting new features in great use, peformance & scalability)
• F# (asyncronous programming)
• Astoria (exception to the rule of not going to high level sessions)
• Visual Studio 2008 & .NET Framework 3.5 (cleared the confusion between v2.0, v3.0, v3.5 and multi-targeting)

In addition to all the sessions and the standard keynote at the beginning of the event, there was a very interesting talk by Pat Helland titled "Movable Objects and Irresistable Forces". It was about how he sees the future of computing in terms of hardware becoming cheaper and more un-reliable (irresistable forces) and how he believes software will have to adapt to cater for this (movable objects).

I'm going to follow this up by a series of posts in each of the topics I think are interesting. In the meantime I'll just finish off by saying that I'm still not convinced by LINQ and I'm not the only one either!