Wednesday, April 11, 2007

LINQ and Entity Framework Resource Updates

Jim Wooley's LINQ articles on MSDN2 post this morning reminded me that I hadn't been updating my prior LINQ and Entity Framework resource posts as often as this rapidly-moving field justifies. Jim's post provides links to five Microsoft LINQ-related white papers that were updated in February and March 2007 to coincide with the Orcas March 2007 CTP's release. Jim's comment

I scanned over the documentation and there are a number of issues in the documentation, which is understandable considering the moving target. I do find it interesting that they leverage some language features not yet available in the current CTP, most notably VB's anonymous functions which will equate to the C# lambda expression.

surprised me because of the recent updates. Jim's reply of 4/11/2007 1:09 AM UCT in the Compiled Queries in LINQ to SQL - performance considerations and entity caching thread in the LINQ Project General forum explains some of the discrepancies in the LINQ to SQL: .NET Language-Integrated Query for Relational Data whitepaper.

I've updated the following posts this morning to add the updated white papers, as well as more recent LINQ and EF-related articles and blog items:

Update 4/12/2007: Beth Massi has posted links to sign up for the following VB-oriented "Live From Redmond: VB9" Webcasts, most of which are focused on LINQ or include LINQ-related content:

  • Orcas Overview, April 24, 2007, 9:00 AM PST. John Stallo will cover the breadth of features that you can expect to see in the upcoming release of Visual Basic. John will demo how all the features such as LINQ, n-tier, WCF support, and OCS work together to help you build your applications faster than ever before.
  • LINQ Overview, April 25, 2007, 9:00 AM PST. Kit George will explore the new LINQ features in Visual Basic. We will show how to take advantage of LINQ to build applications that query and aggregate data from multiple sources, including in-memory objects, databases, and XML.
  • LINQ to SQL & O/R Designer Deep Dive, May 2, 2007, 9:00 AM PST. Young Joo extends the SQL and LINQ web cast by showing you how to use the new OR designer to build applications that take advantage of LINQ to SQL.
  • Building N-Tier Applications, May 9, 2007, 9:00 AM PST. Young Joo will show you how you can separate business logic from data access logic using the new n-tier features in Visual Basic.
  • Offline Data Caching May 16, 2007, 9:00 AM PST. Milind Lele will demonstrate how to use SQL Server Compact Edition to build applications that can cache your data offline and have it automatically sync to your database when you are online.
  • Deep Dive into LINQ May 23, 2007, 9:00 AM PST. Amanda Silver will dive into details how the LINQ features work. In the process, we will discuss anonymous types, type inference, inline functions, extension methods, and how these features work together to give you the LINQ experience. In addition, we will demo how these features can be used independently to help you build your applications quicker and with less code.
  • Building Service-Oriented Applications May 30, 2007, 9:00 AM PST. John Stallo will show you how you can produce and consume WCF services using the new WCF support with Visual Basic and build applications that take advantage of the next-generation service architecture.
  • LINQ Best Practices June 13, 2007, 9:00 AM PST. Lisa Feigenbaum will explore best practices for writing easy to read, consumable queries, including naming, usage, and performance ideas.

All presenters are program managers on the VB Team.

Update 4/24/2007: Young Joo has posted zip files of slides from his two VS Connections 2007 presentations: VMS305: LINQ to SQL: Bringing SQL Code into Visual Studio and VMS309: Sneak Peak at Visual Studio "Orcas". VMS305 sounds to me like a preview of his LINQ to SQL & O/R Designer Deep Dive presentation.

Note: The June 6th Webcast is Using the Interop Toolkit to Migrate your VB6 Applications to .NET, which is outside the VB9 scope. For unknown reasons, the author of the presentation descriptions insists on substituting LinQ for LINQ.

There's an average of about 35 blog entries per day tagged with LINQ, so it's not easy to keep up with the new goings on. As an example, Channel9 reported on April 6, 2007:

C# team members Shon Katzenberger, Scott Wiltamuth, Todd Proebsting, Erik Meijer, Peter Hallam, Anders Hejlsberg, and Peter Sollich were recently awarded a Technical Recognition Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement for their work on the C# language. This award is particularly meaningful to the recipients as it is awarded by their technical peers. It's quite an honor.

A video segment featuring the recipients is here.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 1:12 PM

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