Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issues of this magazine, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be released as Visual Studio 2008. We spent a lot of time talking to our major customers and reviewing the feedback we got on blogs and questions on forums on newsgroups to identify what enhancements/features would be most useful to our device developers. One thing that surfaced was that device developers needed more help when it came to testing their applications efficiently. Whether that meant testing on multiple devices or under varying conditions or simply being able to write unit tests, they clearly needed help getting applications to market faster by reducing the testing time. More info

In response to press inquires, Dell blogged the following carefully crafted statement: 'Dell regularly adjusts its product offerings, and how customers can purchase those products. Currently the majority of our Inspiron AMD-based systems are available through our retail partners such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Staples, and through telephone sales. Our AMD-based energy-efficient consumer desktop, the Energy Star 4.0 Inspiron 531 is also still available on Dell.com. More info

In this excerpt, author N. Satheesh Kumar shows us how to query different objects using LINQ operators and avoid having to use the looping method to filter the values in a collection. Without LINQ, we'd have to go through the values one-by-one and then find the required details. However, using LINQ we can directly query collections and filter the required values without using any looping. More info

Misys says it's going to make good on its promise to open source components of its proprietary Connect Healthcare solution at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles today. It expects new products and cheaper prices out of the exercise and maybe even improved healthcare delivery. Linspire is going into the custom desktop Linux Build Service business as a way to give its 7,000 partners a leg up into the market, cutting time and costs. More info

In this interview with the editor-in-chief of .NET Developer's Journal, Microsoft's Anders Hejlsberg discusses the origins and the future of C#. The interview appeared in .NET Developer's Journal, Vol 1 issue 1 - in October 2002. More info

'We expect the investments ILOG has made in its latest release of Rules for .NET, particularly its tight integration with WCF and the .NET Framework, will benefit Microsoft customers who are trying to promote cross-boundary collaboration leveraging BRMS and SOA on Microsoft platforms,' said Burley Kawasaki, Director in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, as ILOG today announced ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0. More info

The annual Consumer Electronics Show keynote by Bill Gates has become an annual tradition, but his 11th CES opening keynote is likely to be his last. During the keynote, Gates talked about the ongoing transformation of the personal computer and he shared sales figures for Windows Vista: Microsoft has sold more than 100 million Windows Vista licenses to date. More info

Learn how workflows built by using WF can be hosted inside services created by using WCF. Also, learn how to make use of some of the broad capabilities provided by WCF to facilitate client-event callbacks by making use of a duplex channel. More info

In this video, Hilton Giesenow demonstrates how to create a multi-view editor that saves and loads two linked files in the same editor window in Visual Studio. More info

Learn how to create a Help file for a Visual Studio extensibility package and then integrate the Help into the package. During the process, specific Help topics and keywords will be associated with user interface objects in a sample Visual Studio tool window. More info