Bart De Smet - C# 5.0 Unleashed

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Bart De Smet

800 East 96th Street, Indianapolis, Indiana 46240 USA

C# 5.0 Unleashed

Copyright 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33690-4

ISBN-10: 0-672-33690-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: April 2013

Editor-in-Chief
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Bart J.F. De Smet is a software development engineer on Microsofts Cloud Programmability Team, an avid blogger, and a popular speaker at various international conferences. In his current role, hes actively involved in the design and implementation of Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) and on an extended LINQ to Anything mission. You can read about Barts technical adventures on his blog at http://blogs.bartdesmet.net/bart.

His main interests include programming languages, virtual machines and runtimes, functional programming, and all sorts of theoretical foundations. In his spare time, Bart likes to go out for a hike in the wonderful nature around Seattle, read technical books, and catch up on his game of snooker.

Before joining the company in October 2007, Bart was active in the .NET community as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for C#, while completing his Bachelor of Informatics, Master of Informatics, and Master of Computer Science Engineering studies at Ghent University, Belgium.

Writing this book was a huge undertaking that would have proven impossible without the support of many people. Id like to apologize upfront for forgetting any of you. (Ill buy you a Belgian beer if I did.)

First and foremost, I cannot thank my family enough for the support theyve given me over the years to pursue my dreams. Their support for my 6-year university studies in Ghent and tolerance for my regular absence to participate in the technical community have all been essential ingredients. If this werent enough, my move across the Pacific Ocean to go and work at the Microsoft headquarters has put us through the ultimate test. Words fall short to describe how incredibly lucky I am to have their ongoing support. Thanks once more!

I wouldnt have ended up in the world of computer science if not for some of my teachers. For my first exposure to computers, I have to go back to 1993, checking sums during the mathematics lessons at elementary school. Thanks to Meester Wilfried for his MS-DOS and GWBASIC powered calculator that shaped my future. In high school, several people kept me on this track, as well. Math teachers Paul, Geert, and Ronny had to endure endless conversations about programming languages. In a weird twist of history, I never got educated in informatics in high school, but nonetheless I spent countless hours in the computer rooms of my school. Without the support of Hans De Four, I wouldnt have gotten where I am today. Sorry for all the network downtime caused by my continuous experiments with ProfPass, domain controllers, and whatnot.

Looking back over 10 years in history, Im eternally grateful to the people at the local Microsoft subsidiary in Belgium (back then called Benelux) for adopting me in the early .NET community and giving me the chance to work on various projects. In particular, I want to thank my very first contact at Microsoft, Gunther Beersaerts, for all the advice he gave me over the years. Gunthers been a true source of inspiration, encouraging me to take the speaker stand at various conferences.

During a few summers in the early 2000s, many Microsoft Belgium people provided a nice place for me to grow and learn while working on various exciting projects. Thanks to Chris Volckerick for taking me on board to build the (now defunct) http://www.dotnet.be website, using what was called ASP+ back then. Later, Gerd De Bruycker took me under his wing to develop the first MSDN home page for Microsoft Belux. Your passion for the developer community has always stuck with me (not just that wild community VIP party in Knokke).

A bigger project called SchoolServer came around in the summer of 2004 and lasted for the years after. Christian Ramiouls faith in my technical skills needed to land this project was unbelievable. And getting to know the IT professional audience that had to work with the solution wouldnt have been possible without the wonderful collaboration I had with Ritchie Houtmeyers (remember the countless hours spent in our server room office?) and Ricardo Noulez. Big thanks go to Bart Vande Ghinste for giving me a crash course on COM+.