DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by nemoby

LINQ Farm: More on the LINQ Aggregate Operators

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:31:23 GMT

The LINQ aggregate operators allow you to perform simple math operations over the elements in a sequence. This post is designed to walk you through those operators, and give you an overview of how to use them.

Charlie will be giving a talk entitled The Essence of LINQ

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:27:02 GMT

Explore the essential technologies that establish LINQ as a unique and important new tool for developers who want to query data. By looking at a series of code samples, attendees will learn that LINQ is integrated, unitive, declarative, hierarchical, extensible, transformative, and composable. These principles illustrate why LINQ has quickly been established as an important new development tool. Other topics covered in the talk include deferred execution, lambda expressions, extension methods, expression trees and the IQueryable<T> and IEnumerable<T> interfaces. The goal of the talk is to give developers a practical understanding of why LINQ is useful, and how it can be used to improve our development process.

Understanding the Technical Book Market

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:38:25 GMT

Mike Hendrickson from O'Reilly has published a survey of the technical book market. As when viewing the TIOBE site, I think it is wrong to extrapolate any broad conclusions about the development languages market from the data you see here. For instance, lots of developers are still writing batch files, it just so happens that the book-market for that syntax is small. Changes in the C/C++ market are slow, which means that developers stick with tried and true books for those very popular languages rather than rushing out to buy new texts. Nevertheless, it is interesting to at least view this data, especially if you happen to be interested in technical books or trends in the broader developer landscape.

Community Convergence XLI

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 04:34:13 GMT

Welcome to the forty-first Community Convergence. The big news this week is that we have moved Future Focus, our peak at features that might appear in the next version of Visual Studio, to the Code Gallery. To seed our efforts on this new platform we have a new post on our plans for the IDE. This post covers a feature named the Call Hierarchy. I should perhaps add that in subsequent Future Focus posts you can expect to see us switch back and forth between our plans for the IDE, the C# language and other features. We want to mix up the issues we discuss, thereby insuring that all the major areas in the product are covered at one point or another. On a related note, I should mentioned that the IDE Dev Lead, Kevin Pilch-Bisson, is also looking for general feedback on features you'd like to see in the next version of the IDE.

Links to LINQ

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 04:01:02 GMT

Here are some useful links to LINQ information.

Link to Everything: A List of LINQ Providers

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 04:01:03 GMT

I've recently updated the list of LINQ Providers found on my Links to LINQ page, accessible from the News section on the left of my blog. I'm sure there are other providers available. Feel free to write me or append a comment if you want to add to this list.

Three levels of extension methods

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:46:02 GMT

Some tips for building up C# 3.0 extension methods to solve problems, from wrapping static framework classes, to creating missing methods, to performing business logic validation.

Linq Expressions - Access private fields

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:24:33 GMT

In this post I will show how you can use Linq Expressions to access private(or public) class fields instead of using Reflection.FieldInfo.

Try/Catch Blocks Can Hurt Performance Significantly

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:01:02 GMT

Over at Programmers Heaven.com, there's an interesting article on the potential performance impact of try/catch blocks. The article concluded that the average cost of a try/catch block is essentially nothing (sorry there's no author information on the post), and that .NET/C# programmers should not think twice about using try/catch blocks. The author is right that a try/catch block has essentially zero cost. However, like most coding performance issues, exceptions and try/catch blocks do not have performance implications until they occur in some type of loop.

TextBox MaxLength From LINQ Meta Data

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:16:02 GMT

Set the MaxLength property using LINQ Meta Data.

Video of Luke Hoban's In-Depth Look at C# 3.0

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:16:02 GMT

Last fall in Barcelona, Spain two PM's from the C# team gave talks on key parts of the new technology found in Visual Studio 2008. * Microsoft Visual C# Under the Covers: An In-Depth Look at C# 3.0 * LINQ to SQL: Accessing Relational Data with Language Integrated Query

LINQ to SQL and SQL Server 2008

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:09:40 GMT

Faisal Mohamood, the LINQ to SQL Program Manager, has posted a blog about the work his team has been doing in preparation for the next release of LINQ to SQL. Faisal says that his team has added support for new T-SQL data types that will be found in SQL Server 2008. These updates include support for the DATE, TIME, DATETIME2 and DATETIMEOFFSET types.

Set ASP.NET TextBox MaxLength via LINQ Meta Data

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 06:41:45 GMT

With a simple ExpressionBuilder, you can declaratively set the MaxLength property of a TextBox to your database column length.

LINQ Farm Seed: Using the Expression Tree Visualizer

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:46:02 GMT

The Visual Studio 2008 CSharp samples include several valuable tools that LINQ developers can use to help expedite the development process. One of the is the Expression Tree Visualizer. This tool works in both Visual Studio Express and the other versions of Visual Studio that support C# development.