StackPanel

Few blog posts ago, I mentioned how I’ve been following the StackOverflow podcast and as I admire Joel and Jeff, now I’ve become a big fan of StackOverflow - the product of Jeff and team’s hardwork over the last few months. It’s one of the first success stories of 2008 per me, I’ve a lot to learn - how this concept was envisioned, prototyped and developed. StackOverflow uses ASP.Net MVC and Linq to Sql, I’ve learnt.

Wait a minute, what is StackOverflow you ask, well.. as per the ‘About’ section of the site,

Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it’s just free. And fast. Very, very fast.

Stack Overflow is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home — better programming is our goal. With the help of software engineers like you, we can fill the world with good answers to every imaginable programming question.

Well, the ones that have answers, anyway.

We plan to make Stack Overflow as frictionless and painless to use as we possibly can. We believe finding the right answer to your programming questions should be as easy as falling into the pit of success.

And maybe even a little fun.

Currently it’s in a private beta and will soon by next month will be made public. I think this is going to be huge for the developer community. It’s so simple, fast, elegant and more importantly very useful, lots of learning to do. It’s very addictive as well.

It’s a private beta right now; you can sign up and on a FIFO basis, you’ll get an invite.

Read Scoble’s impression on StackOverflow

In my latest project, I dived in to the world of Linq, by using Linq to Sql. As I have loads of XML related application logic I also got to use Linq to XML. We have XElement class given to us from System.Xml.Linq namespace which has loads of usefulness over the old world XmlElement class. So there I go admiring XElement, but wait I don’t have an InnerXml method, that lot of us have gotten used since the MSXML DOM days.

I came up with providing an Extension method InnerXml() on XElement.

public static string InnerXml(this XElement element)
{
    StringBuilder innerXml = new StringBuilder();

    foreach (XNode node in element.Nodes())
    {
        // append node's xml string to innerXml
        innerXml.Append(node.ToString());
    }
    return innerXml.ToString();
}

Someone was exactly looking for this on StackOverflow (the awesome tech QnA site that is in private beta right now)

Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio 9 SP 1 and .Net Framework 3.5 SP 1

Some of the important features included are:

1. Net Framework Client Profile - 86.5% reduction from 197 MB 26.5 MB for applications deployment
2. WPF Designer - Improvements
3. Entity Framework for DATA access to different data providers (as opposed to Linq to Sql)
4. Changes to CLR that improve application startup time by 20-45 %
5. ADO.Net data services
6. WPF enhancements with Hardware acceleration

Last but not the least, I would like to call it “VS 9“, rather than “Visual Studio 2008″, because it is short and also there is a nifty 9 in the icon, like so,