If you're not firmly embedded in the Microsoft world, it would be easy to miss some important developments in the past few years. In particular, many of the best minds in programming language design now work for Microsoft Research, and it's starting to show. Let's take a quick look at C# 3.0 (included in the .Net 3.5 SDK and Visual Studio 2008). This is a language that has rapidly evolved from being near-equivalent to Java, to being near-equivalent to an object-functional language I used to work with called Nice. It's got lexical scoping, a convenient syntax for anonymous functions, type inference, and so on. Read on for examples!

Sandcastle Help File Builder provides a GUI front end to the Microsoft Sandcastle documentation generator tool. As Scott Hanselman has reported, NDoc, the former de facto standard source code documentation generator for .Net has been defunct for some time. I finally downloaded Sandcastle, Microsoft's attempt to fill the void left by NDoc, today, and was not at all happy with the amount of time I spent tweaking the scripts, which involve running 10+ separate command line tools, all of whose command line parameters or other details have changed since the instructions were written.