Snowball - The Blog

Yesterday, I gave my talk on ASP.NET 3.5 - AJAX - LINQ - Silverlight for Visug. Here is the slide deck of that talk:

http://www.codeflakes.net/blog/file.axd?file=ASP_NET35_AJAX_LINQ_Silverlight.pptx

Kris has a link to a new little tool named LinqPad on his blog.

From the site:
Tired of querying in antiquated SQL?
Well, you don't have to!  LINQPad lets you interactively query SQL databases in a modern query language: LINQ.  Kiss goodbye to SQL Management Studio!

LINQPad supports everything in C# 3.0 and Framework 3.5:

LINQ to SQL
LINQ to Objects
LINQ to XML
LINQPad is also a terrific tool for learning LINQ: it comes preloaded with 200 examples from the recently released C# 3.0 in a Nutshell.  There's no better way to experience the coolness of LINQ and functional programming.

LINQPad is free and needs no installation: just download and run.  The executable is only 1MB and is self-updating.

Microsoft released a new preview of the ADO.net Entity Framework, this time Beta 3. The ADO.NET Entity Framework is the latest Microsoft technology to support the RTM versions of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Beta 3 is the followup to Beta 2, which was released last August.

ADO.NET 2.0 data providers that have committed to support the ADO.NET Entity Framework include Core Lab, DataDirect Technologies, IBM, MySQL, and Sybase. Oracle is not ready yet, but will be added in the near future.

Together with the announcement, MS also announced the agreement with 3rd party database vendors for supporting the new framework.

New in this version are mainly some new features, bug fixes and major performance enhancements. "We've got faster view generation, some simpler generated SQL, we've taken a lot of feedback from customers in some of these areas," said Elisa Flasko, program manager for the Data Programmability team at Microsoft.

"The changes have mostly been around the mapping and in the Entity Data Model of the Entity Framework itself," Flasko said. "As far the LINQ to Entities implementation, it has mostly been fit and finish." Users can, however, now do compiled LINQ query for better performance.

If you already used the Beta 2, it's advised to go through the breaking changes list here.

Want to get started? Go here for the plugins.

If you don't know what to do this Sunday, I've got some interesting LINQ links you can easily fill your day with!

On CodeProject, I found a nice introduction article on LINQ, so if you haven't used it yet, this article might get you up to speed. You can read it here: http://www.codeproject.com/vista/LINQ_1.asp
After that, there's a nice on-demand webcast on Enterprise Library 3.0 that you can see here.

Enjoy!