LINQ

Learning LINQ - No excuses

Shawn Cicoria — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:59:30 GMT

There are really a whole bunch of great resources out there that help the community get up & running with LINQ.

Personally, with all the additional providers that I've seen (Qak Leaf List) - several of which I see great use for - LINQ to SharePoint and LINQ to LDAP / LINQ for AD.

In regards to tools, LINQ Pad is the tool that allows you to toil with the syntax, etc.

LINQ Pad

And now, here's a good 100+ pages on LINQ syntax in C# 3.0.

Book Preview: C# Query Expressions and Supporting Features in C# 3.0

All of this is free!!!

Parallel Computing - NY Times Article and the .NET Parallel Extensions.

Shawn Cicoria — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:38:53 GMT

A timely article appeared in the NY Times today (link) regarding Parallel computing as the next key factor in keeping up with the ever demanding needs of getting things done faster. As the article points out, the single CPU processor can't address our needs for faster computational capability without literally burning up or melting. I've seen this personally with Vista and the stressing of the GPU on some older notebooks.

So, what's the solution, well, it's been around for decades, it's just now getting great support in .NET with the Parallel Extensions to .NET now in CTP form

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E848DC1D-5BE3-4941-8705-024BC7F180BA&displaylang=en

Check out the teams Blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/

More importantly, check out Daniel Moth's screen casts (this guy rocks)...

http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2007/11/parallel-extensions.html

Now, what application will benefit from parallel processing? Physics still rules here, and all the issues of cross thread synchronization, concurrency, race conditions, deadlock, etc. - well, they all still exists. But the library is making some of the decisions (partitioning, communication, synchronization, etc.) for you and optimizing based upon the task at hand vs. the hardware present.

One thing to note is they've done tight integration with LINQ, which can provide strong candidates for parallel tasks against sets where the greatest results are gained with in memory processing.

Query SQL (or any LINQ Provider) Using LINQPad...

Shawn Cicoria — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:46:10 GMT

Here's a cool tool that provides an interactive LINQ environment that you can use to develop queries against LINQ sources (SQL, Objects, XML, etc.).

If you're working with LINQ and need an environment that supports both expression and language statements in C# or VB.NET, this tool can handle both. The below shot is using C# statements.

A few bonus items included:

1. provides a view of both the resulting SQL and Lambda expressions used in the query.

2. Provides SQL execution as well

3. A whole bunch of samples for learning LINQ

http://www.linqpad.net/

Conceivably, you could leverage this in place of SQL Management Studio or for those still stuck on 2K, Query Analyzer....