Welcome to the fifty-sixth community convergence. As you probably know by now, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has been released on MSDN and will be available to the general public on Wednesday, October 21, 2009. I’ve worked with the team to create a wide range of technical material designed to support this release, and I will call out each item out here in this post. Be sure to check out the new How Do I and Interview videos, the samples, and the great posts by Alexandra Rusina. In other news, we’ve gotten word that the SoCal code camp will be held right after PDC this year. If you live in the LA area, this is a great chance to see some of the Microsoft speakers who will be presenting at PDC.

From the C# Team

How Do Videos on C# 4.0

• How Do I Use Named and Optional Parameters in C# 4.0? (with Sam Ng)
• How Do I Use COM Interop and Office in C# 4.0? (with Sam Ng)
• How Do I Use Covariance and Contravariance in VS 2010 Part I? (with Eric Lippert)
• How Do I Use Covariance and Contravariance in VS 2010 Part II? (with Eric Lippert)

How Do Videos on the Visual Studio 2010 IDE

• How Do I Use Highlight References in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE (with DJ Park)
• How Do I use Code Snippets in the Visual Studio IDE (with Karen Liu)
• How Do I Use Generate from Usage in Visual Studio 2010? (with Karen Liu)
• How Do I Use the Call Hierarchy? (with DJ Park)
• How Do I Step with the Debugger in Visual Studio? (with Dustin Campbell)
• How Do I Refactor my Code in Visual Studio Part I? (with Dustin Campbell)
• How Do I Refactor my Code in Visual Studio Part II? (with Dustin Campbell)

Interview Videos on Channel 9

• C# 4.0 Dynamic with Chris Burrows and Sam Ng

Alexandra Rusina

• Generating Dynamic Methods with Expression Trees in Visual Studio 2010
• Dynamic in C# 4.0: Introducing the Expando Object
• Dynamic in C# 4.0: Creating Wrappers with Dynamic Object

Eric Lippert

• What is this thing you call "thread safe"?
• As Timeless As Infinity (On Delphi, VB Script and Exceptions)
• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (On Constructors)
• What's the difference between "as" and "cast" operators?
• Why No Extension Properties?
• Why does char convert implicitly to ushort but not vice versa?

Kirill Osenkov

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Known Issues
• Saving images (.bmp, .png, etc) in WPF/Silverlight
• Links

Luca Bolognese

• Becoming really rich with C#

Beta 2

• Visual Studio 2010 Samples
• MSDN Subscribers: Download the Beta
• A Video on How to Download and Install the Beta
• Walkthroughs and Related Content

From the C# Community at Microsoft

Scott Guthrie

• Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library (Preview 6) and the Microsoft Ajax Minifier
• URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

Scott Hanselman

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
• Hanselminutes on Channel 9 - Inside CodePlex.com
• Hanselminutes Podcast 184: Preview of ASP.NET 4 with Scott Hunter
• Windows Home Server: Restoring when you didn't have Network Drivers installed before
• Hanselminutes Podcast 183: LIVE! Gadgets, Hi-Def, WebCams, 4G and More
• A new MSDN for a new Operating System and a new Development Environment
• Review and Comparison: Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD and VX-7000 with High Quality Video in Skype and Live Messenger

Dan Fernandez

• My Picks for PDC 2009

• The Coding4Fun Show: Advanced Rendering with Silverlight, Rick Barraza

MSDN Magazine

• Lining Up Columns
• A Necessary 101 on Professional Application Development
• File > New > Project: Developing a New MSDN Magazine!!

Mitsu

• Surface Academy Toolkit with Card Game, plus Dick Lantim!

From the Community

• September INETA Newsletter