After watching the C# Futures presentation by Anders at the 2008 PDC I got REALLY excited about what's in the future for C#.  The dynamic keyword? Wicked cool.  But I got to thinkin about all that really cool stuff.

How many "regular joes" actually use all the new cool stuff that C# packs? How 'bout LINQ? When looking at sorting a collection of objects does the "regular joe" automatically pick LINQ to do the heavy lifting or does he or she hit google to ask how to sort a collection of objects by one or more properties?

I'm a geek.  Seeing the dynamic keyword and watching the video makes me salivate and wish that this stuff was shipping by Christmas(2008).  I know it's not, but it's amazing stuff - IF you're into that kind of stuff.  I am into that stuff but I think I'm in the minority.

My canundrum of the day.  Is using advanced software/language constructs that ultimately make software better by making the framework do more, hurting our industry because it's harder to maintain by the "regular joe" or is it helping our industry?

I go to Lenovo's site about once a week to configure my dream machine and see what the price looks.  Here's what it was a while back:

And here's the one I priced today:

Huh, so without looking at the first one which I built on October 23, I picked almost the same components, the only difference that I can spot is that today I picked a 200 gig secondary drive compared to the 160 gig drive I picked last month.

The other difference is that the one I priced today looks like it'll ship within 9 business days, and the first one would ship in over 4 weeks. Whew, thankfully I didn't purchase last month. But following the current trend, I figure if the price keeps falling at the current rate of about 656 bucks a month, in only 3 short months I might be able to afford it cuz it'll be down to about 2400 :)

Mr. Zheng over on istartedsomething.com as always has revealed yet another cool ass thing coming with Windows 7: Search Connectors. I downloaded his Flickr Search Connectr for the Windows Search Federation and it prompted me to record what it does check it out here.

Note: This is running a vmware image (on this machine) and as of now the super cool ass visual effects of Windows 7 are not visible(at least until I build a dedicated machine for Windows 7 or vmware figures out DirectX 10 support).  But the performance is VERY good on the vm.

I'm watching Anders' PDC 2008 presentation on the future of C# and right around minute 37 I noticed something cool.  He uses XElement to create a little xml fragment for the thing he was demonstrating.  Just to test it out I wrote this code:

	IDictionary<string, int> members = new Dictionary<string, int>(){ { "Chris", 38 }, { "Anja", 37 }, { "Riley", 4 }, { "Emmitt", 2 } }; XElement element = new XElement("Family", from m in members select new XElement(m.Key, m.Value)); Console.WriteLine(element.ToString());
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Which outputs this:

Kinda cool, I've never used XElement before today but it's nice to know you can generate xml very easy using this(without having to create a dom).

Here's my code.