It’s official MainSoft developers have too much time on their hands. I personally think so, but if you are one of those coders who always wished they could debug .NET code on Linux using your Wii remote you might disagree with me.

Video: Debugging .NET On Linux Using a Wii Remote

One of the things I love to learn about is the history of how things come to be. Specifically my interests have always been in the evolutions of religion and the tech world (yeah I know pretty much polar opposites, but that is what I like to learn about). I came across an interesting article in my MSDN subscription that talked about how language features of C# 3.0 came to be. The features I am talking about are:

• Lambda Expressions
• Extension Methods
• Anonymous Types
• Implicitly Typed Local Variables
• Object Initializers
• Query Expressions
• LINQ

All these features were made possible because of they wanted to add a feature that let you query collections much like how you query SQL (LINQ) and the strong convictions of the C# language maintainers to not implement hacked together solutions. Much of the same convictions that I try to promote on this blog, and because of these convictions C# developers got some very nice features out of the language.

If you have not heard of LINQ before, this is the basic C# language construct (notice the similarities to SQL):

var overdrawnQuery = from account in db.Accounts
                     where account.Balance < 0
                     select new { account.Name, account.Address };

This article, The Evolution Of LINQ And Its Impact On The Design Of C#, is well worth the read and I recommend it to anybody that wants to learn more about C# 3.0 or is just interested in how good coding practices can have great impact on projects.

I haven’t even herd of a new version of SQL Server 2008, coming out, but according to this blog the new version has some very interesting and new data types that will come in useful for geography processing.

DATE - ANSI-compliant date data type
TIME - ANSI-compliant time data type with variable precision
DATETIMEOFFSET - timezone aware/preserved datetime
DATETIME2 - like DATETIME, but with variable precision and large date range

GEOMETRY - “flat earth” spatial data type
GEOGRAPHY - “round earth” spatial data type
HIERARCHYID - represents hierarchies using path enumeration model

The first four datatypes are regular SQL datatypes but the last three datatypes are exposed as .NET system UDTs.