For those of you ready to ring the death knell on LINQ to SQL, hold your horses and check out this post about fixes & enhancements to L2S in VS2010/.NET4. LINQ to SQL in VS2010/.NET 4...

A few months ago, Diane Wilson reported her performance findings when comparing EF to LINQ to SQL to DataReaders. Something looked wrong to me because her numbers were vastly different than what I had been seeing in the many perf tests that I did. We talked a bit and I pointed her to the critical perf...

Last week, I was demoing some basic Entity Framework queries to a client and explaining that the store queries are parameterized, alleviating one area of concern. But when we looked at SQL Profiler the query was not parameterized. Why was this? The query I had used was: var query = from c in context...

Not all CLR methods can be used when building LINQ to Entities or LINQ to SQL queries. The method needs to be something that can be expressed in the native query language. So if you have a date field, you can't use ToShortDateString in the query since there is no equivalent. You'll get runtime exceptions...

I am copying (and slightly modifying so that it is not out of context) a forum post that I wrote to put here in my blog. Here's the original thread if you are interested. When working with object services, you can query data using  LINQ to Entities or ObjectQueries with Entity SQL. Unless you specifically...

This isn't even new news, but it is somewhat new to me! I met Damien at an SDR back in October and had fun sitting with him before I headed to the airport as he advised me that I should probably just get off the fence and move to C# finally. The discussion was mostly around the fact that I won't code...

The return type of a LINQ query is an IQueryable, even a LINQ to Entities query. Here is a screenshot of a LINQ to Entities query at design time (code is NOT being debugged). But when the query has been processed, it's no longer an IQueryable, but an ObjectQuery. What's going on here? At design time...

Highlights of this post from Timothy Ng of the VB team: "Over the last few months, the VB and Data Programmability teams were working on fixing a performance problem with LINQ to SQL (which also manifested in LINQ to Entities). The issue was that LINQ to SQL was generating sub optimal T-SQL queries when...

One of the points Faisal made in his post Coming soon to LINQ to SQL is that there will be support for the new types in SQL Server 2008 in the next release (SP1?). It made me wonder if the LINQ to Entities and Entity SQL will gain these before Entity Framework is released? One of the benefits of Entity...

If you've been wondering, and many of us have, Faisal Mohamood, LINQ to SQL Program Manager, gives us a hint in this blog post: Coming soon to LINQ to SQL . It's hard to tell if he's talking about things coming in VS2008 SP1 or if we will have to wait much longer. Update: Charlie Calvert's blog indiciates...

Congrats to Jim Wooley, Fabrice Marguerie and Steve Eichert! And THANKS for writing it. It's been a long haul! I have really been anticipating this book!...

In my post about rewriting Brad Abram's MVC + Entity Framework example in VB , I pointed out a better way to query a collection of objects and return their entity references (eg, query products and bring along the category information) without writing a scary query filled with references, checks for...

There's a big difference between looking for a problem to solve with LINQ vs realizing LINQ will solve the problem at hand. Patrik Lowendahl had his "aha!" moment recently. Read more.... [A New DevLife post]...

This is a small milestone for me. I had to add a feature to a website for a client and thought it would be a great opportunity to use LINQ to SQL. So I built the feature with LINQ to SQL , had the sysadmin add .NET 3.5 runtime to the webserver and deployed it. Works great! Big grin.......

Roger Jennings pointed out this quote from Dare : "...even though I’ve been using C# for the past five or six years, I feel like I have to relearn the language from scratch to fully understand or be able to take advantage the LINQ features." which lines up with my previous post talking about what it...

Roger Jennings writes about issues with finding examples of complex LINQ to XML queries. Boy have I been there and done that. One of the problems with learning LINQ is that you have two options 1) learn LINQ very deeply so you can do what you need or 2) learn by example With LINQ, I tend to start with...

Scott Guthrie has a post on Dynamic Data Support for ASP.NET that's in the Extensions CTP. Based on my little rant from yesterday , I wanted to point out this: One of the cool new features is something we call "ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support". In a nutshell this enables you to really quickly build data...

Roger's post are so chock full of information, it's easy to miss things on the first read or two but they are alwasy worth returning to, especially as he updates them to keep them accurate. In a recent post, he pointed to an "article" - 38 pages is quite long for an article - which is part of the WROX...

The title is a bit of a misnomer and not comparing apples to apples. To do it right would have been longer. The real comparison is "Choosing LINQ to Entities vs. Entity SQL+Object Services vs. Entity SQL+EntityClient" When doing an intro session on entity Framework last night for GUVSM in Montreal, even...

Last week I did something that may have seemed a little silly to some, but was a great deal of fun. I left my house at 7am, drove to the airport, flew all the way across the country (from the northeast corner of the U.S. to the southwest corner) to San Diego to give a 2 hour presentaiton to the San Diego...

I'm ashamed that this is STILL on my to-do list as I have probably written and presented more about Query Notification than most people. But I see via Roger Jennings blog that Ryan Dunn has the key of the implementation posted on his blog (by way of a hot tip from Mike Pizzo on the DP* team :-)). To...

I've been watching Roger Jennings blog as he forayed into hammering on the use of stored procs in LINQ to SQL. Like a great and supportive pal, I sat on the sidelines while he dug dizzyingly deeper and deeper to try to work out issues with what a stored proc actually returns (different than using LINQ...

[Update at bottom of post] I wrote this in response to a question on the ADO.NET Orcas forums and thought I would copy it here. Note that Danny Simmons writes more information about Entity Framework and DataTables in the thread. Here's my solution for now... LINQ to Datasets does allow for conversions...

While Jim Wooley is looking at performance in LINQ to SQL , I've finally pulled the VS2008 installation on my VPC out of the mysteries of SQL Server Express and installed SQL Server Developer Edition so that I can look at my queries as they come into profiler. Note that this is all based on VS2008 Beta2...

Developers have been playing with LINQ to SQL long enough now that they are past the "how to" and thinking about performance. Jim Wooley blogs about LINQ to SQL Perf and using CompiledQuery.Compile to get the best performance. He also points to a series of posts on LINQ to SQL Performance by msdn blogger...

The ADO.NET team is conducting a focus group about Linq to Entities during TEchEd. Unfortunately, they posted this today and the deadline to sign up is today. Here's the info to sign up. I won't be at TEchEd this year and neither will Roger Jennings, but Roger has already created a great list of points...

In my short span betwee MIX and DevTeach (leaving tonight), I've been heads down playing with Silverlight's Inking capabilities and preparing for my DevTeach sessions and avoiding dealing with the delay of EF. In the meantime, Roger Jennings continues to organize all of the info about ADO.NET Entity...

Mike Taulty has been doing short screen casts about LINQ to SQL. I love his approach as I know from experience how difficult it is to try to give a decent presentation of LINQ to SQL in a single 90 minute session when you have to start from scratch. There are 9 so far and more coming. Here is a link...

Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati has a book on LINQ that he wrote against very early bits. When the March 2007 CTP came out, he blogged a list of things that he discovered had changed in LINQ syntax that required updates to his book. The list is handy if you have code even from the January CTP....

From the forums ( this thread ): A future version of SqlMetal.exe will generate DataContract and DataMember attributes on your entities for you. Putting them on the DataContext won't work because the DataContext is not serializable. (Matt Warren, Microsoft)...

In a previous interation, I managed to track down some sample code that built a LINQ call to a stored procedure, the class which it returns and executed it in LINQ to SQL. The code has changed dramatically in the March CTP. Luckily, Mike Taulty beat me to it and I leveraged the C# code in his post to...

VB9 has come a long way in the new March CTP of Orcas! Paul Vick has a quick list of what is now in there. And there are a lot of good details in the msdn documentaiton that comes along with the CTP. A few things I noticed quickly when bringing my LINQ for SQL demos over to the new bits. First, and happily...

Since a few people have asked me in email (which is not a problem...), I thought I'd make mention that the next CTP for Orcas is the February CTP. It is coming out either late February or early March. This version, though still a CTP, should have all of the LINQ and EF stuff updated and incorporated...

Don't get me wrong. I love LINQ and LINQ for SQL. But the more I have been digging into it the more things I discover that, as a developer, I may want to explicitly choose how to use. That's probably why my talk on Linq for SQL with Web Apps last night at VTdotNET was pretty long. (Going to have to cut...

After living 100% in LINQ for the past week, this is my conclusion. And that's just LINQ to SQL. There are just so many ways to skin the database with LINQ. The possibilities seem quite endless at this point. But I'm having fun and we'll see if I can keep it to 1.5 - 2 hours tonight at VTdotNET! Swoon...