LINQ in Action - THE LINQ book

I often get asked how LINQ to SQL is supposed to be used with Test Driven Design (TDD). Okay, not really. People aren’t knocking on my door or calling me at 3:00 am. I do, however, occasionally read developers angst on their personal blogs. It seems they are trying to actually do this, but are often confounded by the DataContext and its dearth ...

One of the frequently asked questions is about the lifetime of a DataContext. Should it be a long-lived, application-scoped object or should it be a short-lived, request-scoped object? Let's get to the answer by considering the key parameters: DataContext is ideally suited for a ''unit of work'' approach: Retrieve a bunch of objects through one ...

At long last, the process of doing my first book is coming to a close. I started this project last March. Through the process we had to revisit our work numerous times, including each time a new CTP or Beta drop came. For me, 10 months, and Fabrice 2 years later, we found out this week that the book is going to press. What does this mean for you, ...

Check it out and see if you know the answer. Rico's Performance Tidbits...(read more)

You may have seen me present it at a speaking engagement. You may have watched the podcasts. You may have even downloaded the sample application. Now you can see it in action. ThinqLinq.com is now live. The site was designed completely in VB with LINQ as the data access mechanism. The base application was built in 2 hours from not knowing ...

If you downloaded the VPC image version of Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, make sure to back-up your data and move anything off of the Team Foundation Server before November 1, 2007. I was just informed that the images will be time bombing on November 1 2007 rather than the originally intended March 15, 2008 date. If you don't download it now, you may ...

When I originally started the ThinqLinq project I began by loading the RSS feed from my DevAuthority blog, and iterating over the results adding them to the PostItems table in the data context. With LINQ this is relatively easy. Loading the XML from the feed is done with a single line: Dim Feed As System.Xml.Linq.XDocument = ...

I've uploaded the files for my presentations for the fall Code camp season which I just presented last weekend at the Birmingham, Alabama code camp. If you missed the talks, you can pick up the downloads at the following links. Also, I will be at the Charleston, South Carolina code camp this coming weekend (10/13) so you can catch me there. ...

As LINQ nears release, people are starting to consider the performance implications that the extra overhead brings. Currently there are two threads on this: thread1, thread2. For those that are intested in the performance implications, I highly recommend checking out the outstanding series of posts by Rico Mariani. Ultimately if you want to get ...

So, again you thought I was done with this series, that I've given up and moved on to greener pastures. You think that since Select works wonderfully that that's all you need to know to make your own IQueryable provider? Ha! There's loads more to know. And, by the way, Select is still broken. ...(read more)