John Backus, inventor of FORTRAN, has passed away at 82. Among other things, Backus was also the inventor of the BNF (Backus-Naur form) commonly used to express context-free grammars. A revolutionary thinker has passed from our midst.

The New York Times has an obituary here.

Delegates rock. But there's a dark side to them that can cause non-obvious bugs. Read on if you dare!

Let me offer a big "thanks" to the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developers Group for a fantastic time last night. Due to traffic, I was a little late getting there but it didn't seem to affect the evening. As usual, I found the Ann Arbor crowd to be a highly-sophisticated bunch. All through my talk ("Delegates and Events") there were insightful questions and astute observations made by the audience. Speakers: if you're looking for a great place to give a talk, this is the place.

Also, the IPA at the Ann Arbor Brewing Company is simply to die for.

OK, I'm done downloading the March CTP of Orcas. Everyone else can go ahead. Thanks for your patience.

The Orcas March CTP is out! You can get the installer version here and the VPC image here. This is first CTP that has all of the features from last May's LINQ Preview. IOW, this is a big one!

On a side note, I would appreciate everyone waiting to download until I'm finished so that I can maximize my bandwidth. TIA!

C# 3.0 Lambda expressions have distinct advantages over C# 2.0 anonymous methods. This article takes a look at how using lambda expressions can improve the compiler's type inference for generic methods.

At first, the syntax of C# 3.0 lambda expressions can be a bit intimidating. This article unravels the syntax to show that they are really anonymous methods on steroids.

Are you confused by all of the talk about functional programming going on in the world of C# these days? If so, maybe it's time to play a little catch up.

There are a lot of resources available that you can go to but the most valuable that I've found are the video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman from MIT's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course. These lectures were given in 1986 and may look a bit dated (I saw one guy in the class that looks like "Rusty" from "National Lampoon's Vacation") but the content is fantastic.

You can download the video lectures here.