LINQ in Action - THE LINQ book

DevTeach Montréal will take place this year between December 1 and 5. I have the pleasure to take part to this event and speak in no less than five sessions!

Here are my sessions, all in French:

• Tout d'abord une série de quatre sessions que j'ai le plaisir de présenter avec Frédéric Schäfer. Il s'agit d'une reprise enrichie de notre session de l'Université du SI.
  Ces sessions vous permettrons de découvrir LINQ, Entity Framework, WPF, Silverlight et WCF en action.
  Il n'est pas nécessaire d'assister à l'ensemble des quatre sessions. Vous pouvez très bien n'assister qu'à certaines sessions. Nous fournirons un bref récapitulatif des épisodes précédents au début de chaque session.
  
• Application Order Tracking - 1/4 - Créer un modèle métier testé avec Entity Framework et manipuler des données avec LINQ
• Application Order Tracking - 2/4 - Développer une interface utilisateur riche et testable avec WPF en utilisant des design patterns
• Application Order Tracking - 3/4 - Persister ses objets avec Entity Framework et adapter l'interface utilisateur en conséquence
  
• Application Order Tracking - 4/4 - Développer une application Silverlight distribuée avec WCF
  
• Je présente également une session en solo : Nouveautés des langages C# 3.0 et VB 9.0 (LINQ)
  Il s'agit d'une reprise de la session d'Introduction à LINQ, C# 3.0 et VB 9.0 que j'ai jouée avec Philippe Mougin durant les Microsoft TechDays France.
  

Frédéric présente une session en solo : Développement piloté par les tests.

Toutes les sessions sont détaillées sur le site de DevTeach.

Rendez-vous donc début décembre pour retrouver avec nous la fraîcheur de Montréal à cette époque et la chaleur de nos amis québécois !

Today, I received a copy of LINQ im Einsatz. This is the German translation of LINQ in Action. It's now available from Amazon.de and from Hanser.

Bonus: The German version is bigger than the English one. It contains chapter 14, which covers LINQ to DataSet and is provided in English only as a PDF download from Manning's website.

Maybe we'll see translations in other languages next. French would be a good idea, for example ;-)

Viel Spaß beim Lesen!

If you're a tech books reader, you may have noticed that over the last few years, Manning has been publishing a lot of books (and ebooks) covering .NET.
Given all the good reviews Manning books are receiving, it looks like they are not too bad... As a Manning author, I'm a bit biased of course :-)

In any case, the point of this post is to announce their new competition: The .NET Daily Drawing.
It all starts on June 19. This promotion will run for one month, until July 17. "Each day’s lucky winner can choose one free .NET ebook of their choice. And finally, on the last day of the drawing, we're awarding one lucky winner... the entire Manning .NET library! (That’s nearly a $3000 value...)"

Sounds worth it, don't you think!

For a change, I won't post about all the positive reviews that our LINQ book received.

Today, I wanted to post about a negative review that has been published recently on Amazon.com. This review is interesting because it's completely different than the others. It gives the book a rating of 2 stars on 5.

Here is the content of the review:

LINQ with no action

I am disappointed with this book - it did not meet my expectations. I found many examples and it is really hard to use them because the author hardly explains where all comes from and why I should go this way and not another one. It sometimes confuses why, where and for what purpose the author shows an example and whether it suits my case. It is hard to decide because there are almost no explanations about roots of examples and basic theory.
However, I am happy with the fact that more and more books about LINQ come up and I do hope to find a proper one for me. Unfortunately, for now, I have to move from one book to another one for finding a solution.

Despite this review, LINQ in Action still has an average of 5 stars on Amazon.com, based on 20 reviews. I'd like to thank everybody who took the time to post a review.
And you, what do you think about our book? Maybe you could post your own review on Amazon.com (and/or on your blog of course)?. Good or bad, I invite you to speak your mind. We can always do better, and as authors we're interested in knowing your opinion.

The ADO.NET team details on its blog what has changed for LINQ to SQL with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta:

Across the LINQ to SQL we have made numerous bug fixes, better SQL translation for queries comparing nullable columns in Visual Basic, and support both in the runtime and the designer for SQL Server 2008.
New SQL Server 2008 Support includes:

• Support for connecting to SQL Server 2008 databases in Server Explorer
• Drag & drop tables in SQL Server 2008 databases from Server Explorer
• Support for the following new types: Date, Time, DateTime2, DateTimeOffset, Filestream

The above is just for LINQ to SQL, but this service pack comes with lots and lots of updates and new features! The ADO.NET team also has a detailed list of what's new for Entity Framework, as well as a list of breaking changes for Entity Framework. The same kind of information can be found on the Astoria team's blog for ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria).

You can get a good overview of what's included in this service pack on Scott Guthrie's blog. There are way too many changes included to repeat them all here.

Note: Scott adds that "The debugger in VS 2008 SP1 has also been improved to provide more debugging support for evaluating LINQ expressions and viewing results at debug time. LINQ enabled data sources now have a "Results View" node show up within the debugger watch window.  Expanding this node will evaluate a LINQ expression and allow you to examine the materialized objects it returns."

C# 3.0 and VB.NET 9.0 introduced implicit typing. When you use anonymous types, it's required. The rest of the time, it's mostly a judgment call to decide whether to use implicitly-typed local variables or not.
An interesting discussion is going on about this on Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo's blog. See all the comments.

Since our LINQ in Action book was published last month, we are lucky to receive a lot of nice feedback and comments. Steve, Jim, and I worked hard to make LINQ in Action a book that readers would enjoy. It's very encouraging to see what readers think about our work!
I have collected a list of reviews and quotes.

• "By far the best book available on LINQ"
• "I have the LINQ books, and this is by far the best"
• "One of the best overall tutorial texts on software development I have ever come across in 15 years"
• "LINQ in Action ROCKS!"
• "A pure pleasure to read"
• "I'm having a hard time putting down LINQ in Action, to do my actual job!"
• "One of the best .NET books ever written"
• "Best book I've read in a while"
• "I enjoy this book for its practical advice without trying to cover up any holes in the inaugural edition of LINQ"
  

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