Scott Gu just posted on his blog about the new features that Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 will bring to Visual Web Developer Express Edition. ASP.NET MVC will be supported on VWD Express but what I find more exciting is the ability to create class libraries(.dll) projects in VWD. I have always seen that as the biggest drawback of the Express Edition. I hope VWD will be able to open solutions that contain class library projects created in higher editions of Visual Studio. Right now it loads only the web projects. You can read the original post here.

   Update: Scott just confirmed in the comments on his blog that VWD Express will open solutions containing class libraries created in other editions of Visual Studio. I guess that makes VWD Express full featured IDE as long as you are a lone developer.

   Today I was looking at a Sun Certified Java Programmer example test (quite an old one - url no longer valid). There were some quite curious questions. I have taken out and modified questions that apply to C# (unless otherwise noted) and left out Java specific ones. Try to guess the compilation result/output! Here they are in C# version:

1.
     int i = 1;
     i <<= 31;
     i >>= 31;
     Console.WriteLine(i);
2.
     Console.WriteLine(Double.NaN == Double.NaN);

     double zero = 0;
     Console.WriteLine(Double.NaN == 3 / zero);
3.
     int i = 10;
     int j = 10;
     bool b = false;

     if (b = 10 == 10)
         Console.WriteLine("true");
     else
         Console.WriteLine("false");
4. This one behaves differently in Java and C#
Java:
     System.out.println(-0.0);
     System.out.println(-0.0 == +0.0);
     System.out.println(Math.min(-0.0,+0.0));
     System.out.println(Math.max(-0.0,+0.0));
     System.out.println(Math.min(-0.0,+0.0) == Math.max(0.0,+0.0));
C#:
     Console.WriteLine(-0.0);
     Console.WriteLine(-0.0 == +0.0);
     Console.WriteLine(Math.Min(-0.0, +0.0));
     Console.WriteLine(Math.Max(-0.0, +0.0));
     Console.WriteLine(Math.Min(-0.0, +0.0) == Math.Max(0.0, +0.0));
5.
     int i = 0;
     Console.WriteLine(i++ + ++i);
     Console.WriteLine(i++ + i++);
6.
     Console.WriteLine(Double.PositiveInfinity + Double.NegativeInfinity);
     Console.WriteLine(Double.PositiveInfinity == Double.PositiveInfinity);

Check the full article for the actual output!

   While preparing the last set of upgrades for the no-blog I stumbled upon some strange issues with different technologies. I reasoned that I might help some of you or some poor googling soul by posting about them here...

   This is the end, beautiful friend, the end. The end of (your) laughter and (my) soft lies. The end of nights we tried to code. The final part of the series. Because this is a series about the new things in the LANGUAGE C# 3.0 and not in Visual Studio 2008 or .NET Framework 3.5 it will end here. Actually this article is also out of scope but it is needed to better demonstrate how the features work in practice.

...

   Here is the cherry of the cake, the reason for all the new features in C# 3.0, the purpose of human evolution and the reason Google created the Universe in the first place. LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a set of C# language features for manipulating data. Long time ago Anders (Hallowed be his name) reasoned that as more and more applications interact with different data stores and manipulate large sets of data it would be really cool to make data manipulation a first class language feature. The most popular way for applications to interact with data are the databases but data comes in many more forms for example XML documents. So the first problem was to define what data is.

...