C# 3.0 Cookbook 3rd Edition is the latest rendition of the C# Cookbook that has been around since 2003. This one is bigger and better than ever, with helpful recipes that are up to date with the new technology that is included in C# 3.0. The authors have reworked many of the solutions to take advantage of these enhancements.

C# 3.0 Cookbook 3rd Edition is geared for users of every level and contains solutions to problems that developers encounter every day, as well as those obscure items that one can encounter, and have trouble finding a solution for. All in all over 250 'recipes' are presented covering a wide range of topics that will help you solve real life situations. C# 3.0 Cookbook is 886 pages in length and is divided into 20 chapters.

Chapter 1, "Language Integrated Query (LINQ)," is the new way to access data from many different sources. This is a more functional style of programming that helps take programming down a more declarative path that dramatically shortens the amount of code needed to perform some tasks. There are recipes that show usage with Objects, ADO.NET, and XML. Chapter 2, "Strings and Characters," contain topics such as comparing strings, decoding/encoding strings and other techniques that deal with strings and char's

Chapter 3, "Classes and Structures," deals with both class and structure data types. Covered here are a large amount of recipes covering design patterns, building clonable classes, disposing of unmanaged resources, and even converting a class to a full blown command line argument processing system. Chapter 4, "Generics," is about the ability to have code operate uniformly on values of different types. Here you will find out when to use generics, how to mark read-only collections the generic way, and how to initialize generic variables to their default value.

Chapter 5, "Collections," contains recipes that manage collections. Some of the tasks you will see here is how to write a more flexible stack trace path, retrieving all instances of a specific item in a list, and create a read-only array or list. Chapter 6, "Iterators, Partial Types, and Partial Methods," concentrate on two different problems. One is using iterators for generic and custom iterator implementations, and the other is partial types and methods for better segmenting your code, as well as generating code that is more easily extensible.

Chapter 7, "Exception Handling," shows you how best to implement error handling in your application. You will see when to catch and re-throw errors, create exception types, and deal with unhandled exceptions in different types of applications. Chapter 8, "Diagnostics," shows you how to work with data types that fall under the System.Diagnostic namespace. These include Debug/Trace classes, event logs, performance counters, and custom debugger displays.

Chapter 9, "Delegates, Events, and Lambda Expressions," examines each of these in detail. A delegate is an object which represents a method and, optionally the "this" object with that method. An Event is a specialized delegate type primarily used for messaging. Lambda Expressions provide a more concise, functional syntax for writing anonymous methods, which allow code blocks to be written inline where delegate values are expected. Chapter 10, "Regular Expressions," covers the use of the set of classes that are employed to run regular expressions against strings. Included is a recipe that contains many common patterns such as verify an e-mail address, match a zip code, match the format of a social security number, and match or verify a URL.