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Summary Upon deciding to start this series of blogs I decided that in order for me to consume the Blippr API I would attempt to “try” and make my life easy. I decided that the easiest way would be to start writing a LINQ to Blippr provider (first ever try) so that it was possible to easily consume the Blippr platform in any .NET application I ...

When Linq was initially introduced, I thought it was one of the most useful additions that have ever been made to .NET. I still think that now but after working with Linq for a while I’ve come to the conclusion that it can introduce several problems: Queries are scattered all over the code base There is no common reusable query ...

As the PCD2008 hangovers wore off the announcements of the week were overshadowed by the apparent axing of LINQ to SQL.  It all started with a post by Tim Mallalieu, where he stated : We’re making significant investments in the Entity Framework such that as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for ...

I needed to compare the contents of two arrays to see if they were the same.  Obviously Equals won't work because they are different objects and although it would be easy enough to write a little routine to iterate through the arrays I thought that a) it must have been done before and b) there must be some better, generally accepted way of ...

In the 1990s I coded on a few systems where the architecture was that we attached database functionality to our business objects, so you could do something like     someObject.Value = 4;   someObject.Save();   While this looks appealing, this pattern (I later learned that it is called active record) has fallen out of ...

Linq to SQL is great. You can open up your Db schema, drag some tables in, and in no time you have a data context class with loads of functionality, and data classes for all of the entities. No more recordsets to unpack into objects, no more fields to pack into SQL params, just lists of strongly typed ojects. Even better, the classes are ...

Just came across a nasty gotcha today, where by we were trying to use the new C# 3.5 syntax var x = from item in items select new Item { ItemName = item.Name }; and getting a compile error. Turns out this was due to the need to have the following using statement (that doesn't come up in a smart tag prompt when you're writing linq), using ...

What kind of thing is Language Integrated Query, exactly? You can draw the line in a number of places, but I am going to cut it down to the core, where LINQ is a Domain Specific Language.   There are LINQ-enabling language features, i.e the language extensions of type ...

Was just reading on Scott Gu's blog about the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, and came across an excellent description of the new extension methods feature in .Net 3.5. I have to say that until I saw this blog post, the quick overview from Mike Taulty at TechEd lost me somewhat as to what the purpose of these extension methods is, ...