On the way out the door on friday my boss handed me two copies of “CoDe Magazine” for me to look at because they had sent him too many copies. I briefly glanced at the covers and saw some interesting things. The very first thing I noticed was that one issue had, on the cover, an image of the Master Chief from Halo3 with “XNA: Ready for Prime Time?” in a huge, bold font. The other front page bullets for that issue indicated that the issue focused intensely on XNA and game development. The second thing I noticed was that the other issue included a “13-step Crash Course for Using LINQ”.

I tried desperately to hide the drool that had started to form at the corners of my mouth as I said “Sure, I think these might be alright”. So I stuffed them into my backpack like a theif with a fist full of unmarked bills and headed home. I just got done reading both issues and enjoyed their content, albeit one more than the other, so much that I felt compelled to note it here.

I figure I would go over them in order of their publication (one covers July/August, the other September/October).

July / August (vol. 8, issue 4)
Sadly this is the issue that I was least impressed with. Not because it was a “horrible” publication. it just didn’t cover as many topics that interested me as the other issue. In fact it only covered one. Linq. Linq is Microsofts’ latest “wow” feature for .NET 3.5 (codename: “Orcas”) and is quite possibly the coolest god damned thing I have ever seen but since this is just a review of a magazine I’ll save my fanfare for LINQ for another day. The article, for those interested can be found here.

September / October (vol. 8, issue 5)
This issue had a lot to offer that interested me. There was a great write-up featuring productivity tips SQL 2005 which I think every developer should read. Items of note: Pivot, Output Into, CTEs and Recursive Queries. Really, really cool stuff.

The next part was all about Microsofts’ XNA game development framework. There were two great articles covering XNA “XNA: Ready for Prime Time?” and “Introducing XNA Game Studio Express” both worth reading if you have any interest in game design and programming or if you just want to get a really good grasp on why there is so much resistance to managed code frameworks.

There was also a great article covering Lambda Expressions which are another great upcoming feature in .NET 3.5.

.NET · Programming