OakLeaf Systems: LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 11/6/2008+

Saturday, November 08, 2008

LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 11/6/2008+

Note: This post is updated daily or more frequently, depending on the availability of new articles.

••• Update 11/9/2008: 8:30 AM PST Additions
•• Update 11/8/2008: 4:30 PM PST Additions
• Update 11/7/2008 5:30 PM PST: Additions

Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)

••• Shawn Wildermuth lives up to his commitment by posting New Silverlight 2 ADO.NET Data Service Example on 11/8/2008. (See below.)

•• Roger Jennings’ Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework: Table of Contents post of 11/8/2008 provides the final table of contents for his latest book for Wiley.

•• Julie Lerman adds her interpretation to The Future of LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework in her DevSource post of 11/7/2008.

•• John Papa has posted links to the the code samples and slides for his “Developing Applications with the Entity Framework” presentation to the Tampa Bay .NET Users Group on 11/6/2008 in his Great Time with Tampa .NET User Group post of 11.7/2008.

• Julie Lerman’s Chapters 2-9 are on RoughCuts, here's the full chapter list post of 11/7/2008 contains a table of contents for her forthcoming Programming Entity Framework title for O’Reilly.

• Shawn Wildermuth promises a more comprehensive Silverlight 2 example using ADO.NET Data Services, NHibernate, Entity Framework and Forms-based Authentication in in his SilverlightData Examples - Coming Soon post of 11/7/2008.

LINQ to SQL

••• Mark Monster’s Linq to SQL doing it manually: Part 2 – Database creation post of 11/9/2008 describes two false start and one success when attempting to create a database from a manually coded DataContext.

•• Julie Lerman adds her interpretation to The Future of LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework in her DevSource post of 11/7/2008. (Copied from the “EF/EDM” topic.)

Andrew Conrad’s IUpdateable for Linq To Sql post of 11/5/2008 provides an almost-complete IUpdatable implementation for LINQ to SQL. (The only missing method is ClearChanges() for batched multiple changesets.) An IUpdatable implementation for the DataContext object is required to use LINQ to SQL as an updatable data source for ADO.NET Data Services.

You can copy the source code from this post. Andy plans to upload it to CodePlex in due course.

LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, et al.

•• Rob Connery announces SubSonic 3.0 Preview 1: LINQ Has Landed in his 11/7/2008 post. Rob credits Matt Warren with most of the heavy lifting:

LINQ is hard - no really - just ask Ayende. It's not a matter of smarts - it's just really hard to try to fit LINQ in... trust me. I was hoping originally that I could just create an Expression parser and build stuff using our core bits... but umm... that didn't happen.

One of the blogger people I've been following as I've been working through all of this is Matt Warren, the Zeus of LINQ To SQL. He has a great series of posts on how to implement IQueryable, and when he got to post number 9 I began to think I should just use his code wholesale (yes, I know it's cheap of me). He's now on post number 11, and I asked him a while back if I could just steal all of his code - and this is why Matt Warren is my personal Santa Claus - he said "yes - it's all under MS-PL anyway. Just forward the license".

So there it is - the SubSonic.Linq namespace is 99.999999% Matt Warren's code. I've tweaked it a touch to work with our core Query stuff, but everything else is him and his large brain. Thank him for this and have a read on what you get with this provider.

Matt is one of my personal heroes, too.

•• Stan Naspinsky describes how to use “a string array to search through a field for matches” in his Searching for multiple strings using LINQ post of 11/8/2008.

• LinqMaster’s Multiple Join Fields in LINQ post of 11/7/2008 notes that multi-field LINQ joins require use of an anonymous type for the projection.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)

••• Shawn Wildermuth lives up to his commitment by posting New Silverlight 2 ADO.NET Data Service Example on 11/8/2008. (Copied from the “EF/EDM” topic.)

(Repeated from the “LINQ to SQL” topic.)

ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD)

Scott Hunter’s Securing Dynamic Data post of 11/5/2008 points to a sample project that demonstrates how to secure Dynamic Data websites with ASP.NET’s Form Authentication and Roles. You can download the Secure Dynamic Data Sample from Dynamic Data Samples Site on CodePlex.

Scott Guthrie’s Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF includes a pointer to Joe Stegner’s 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos on the ASP.NET web site.

David Hayden describes Scott Hunter’s ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap PDC 2008 session in his ASP.NET Dynamic Data from PDC - Build Database-Driven Web Applications post of 11/4/2008.

SQL Data Services (SDS) and Cloud Computing

••• David Robinson’s Performance gains running your queries in parallel of 11/8/2008 demonstrates the benefit of parallel query processing across up to 26 multiple containers. Query execution time doesn’t decrease linearly with the number active threads: 4 threads process 9,495 FirstName/LastName records in 7.72 seconds; 10 threads do the same in 5.71 seconds, and 26 thread takes 2.94 seconds.

•• McGeeky laments missing transaction support in SDS (Sprint #5) in his Transaction support - not every application needs massive scale post of 11/7/2008 to the SQL Data Services (SDS) - Getting Started forum.

•• Roger Jennings’ Setting Up the Windows Azure Services Platform (WASP): An Illustrated Walkthrough of 11/8/2008 takes the mystery out of the signup process with PDC 2008 attendee and other invitations. His post says:

When you’re accepted into the Windows Azure Services Platform (WASP), you receive three e-mails, two of which contain invitation codes. Navigating the signup process isn’t exactly intuitive, so following is an illustrated journey through the signup processes for Windows Azure Services (SQL Services and .NET Services), as well as Windows Azure Storage and Compute services.

• John Foley tells Why Microsoft Will Prevail In The Cloud in this 11/6/2008 article for InformationWeek's Cloud Computing Destination.

Brandon Watson, “the guy in charge of Cloud Services ecosystem development for Microsoft,” posted on 11/5/2008 The Mashup Conundrum, a discussion of “whose throat do I choke” when a composite, cloud-based service fails. Bandon says:

The topic I did want to cover is the coming need for SLAs and trade agreements between trading partners who may not know that they exist in an application with one another. Imagine a developer building a composite application through the use of multiple web services, each of them running via a different hosting provider. The myriad of problems which can, and will, arise, have yet to be adequately addressed by the cloud providers.

Of course, the problem is that the Windows Azure Service Platform (WASP) currently has no published SLAs or estimated usage pricing.

David Berlind’s take on Brandon’s post is at Micrososoft's Cloud Ecosystem Czar: "When Mashups Fail, Whose Throat Do You Choke?"

John Papa’s Cloud Gazing with Silverlight post of 11/5/2008 points to his “Cloud Gazing From Silverlight 2” article for the November 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine. John discusses cross-domain calls and cross-domain policy files at the end of the article.

Jim Nakashima demonstrates Silverlight MediaElement Playing a Video stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage in this 11/5/2008 post.

Mike Amundsen posted his Simple SDS Query Example in Python to the SQL Data Services (SDS) Getting Started forum on 11/5/2008. Mike says:

Note that this example uses my server (amundsen.com) and proxy (/sds-proxy/) but you could easily modify it to talk directly to the SDS servers or your own instance of the proxy.

Shawn Wildermuth’s SQL Data Services is Cool...but It Won't Work in Silverlight 2 post makes the point that

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) will not work cross-domain regardless of a security policy file (because of some limitations in the two networking stacks that Silverlight 2 uses). Its a problem but in most use-cases ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) is used on the same domain so no biggie...but...

The Azure SQL Data Service uses Astoria to expose their data to the client...that means that with the ADO.NET Client Library that you can't access SQL Data Services.

The way I read the tea leaves is that the Astoria front-end to SDS is a currently unreleased incubation project. SDS’s current front-end is an upgraded version of the earlier SSDS beta version that’s now being migrated to SDS (see SQL Data Services (SDS) Test Harness Updated to the Windows Azure Services Platform). There’s more detail about this topic and a comment from Pablo Castro at LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 10/30/2008+.

Jim Nakashima’s Windows Azure Tools: Getting the right Run/Debug and Publish Functionality post of 11/5/2008 shows you how to start the local Development Fabric and Development Storage services when you press F5 or Ctrl+F5 to run a Cloud Services Web project.

Aleks Gershaft says in a post to the VM Hours thread of 11/3/2008 of the Windows Azure forum that Microsoft:

… will allow people with active development to extend their quota. Since we are not charging during the CTP, we want to make sure the stale development projects are not taking up resources that could be used better.

The current 2000-hour usage limit converts to 83.3 days of continuous use.

SQL Server Compact (SSCE) 3.5 and Sync Services

••• Steve Lasker will present:

DAT314 Unlocking the Power of SQL Server Compact 3.5 (Tuesday, November 11, 5:00-6:15pm)
DAT405 Managing and Versioning Client Databases (Friday, November 14 3:15 - 4:30)

at TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers in Barcelona according to his Heading to Tech Ed EMEA Barcelona post of 11/8/2009.

• Liam Cavanaugh’s TechEd 2008 EMEA Presentations post of 11/5/2008 lists two sync-related sessions on 11/15/2008 at TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers in Barcelona:

WIN201 - Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework (Liam Cavanagh)
WIN04-IS Sync Framework - Deep Dive (Christian Liensberger)

Miscellaneous (WPF, WCF, MVC, Silverlight, etc.)

••• David Chappell analyzes Workflow 4.0, Dublin, and Oslo in his Microsoft-sponsored Creating Modern Applications: Workflows, Services, and Models white paper of 10/2008 and does the same for federated, claims based identity in his Introducing Geneva post of 11/5/2008 that points to a 28-page Word .docx file of the same name.

••• Pablo M. Cibraro’s Adding documentation to WCF Restful services with the REST Starter Kit post of 11/4/2008 shows you how to automate documentation for services that use AtomPub and JSON formats.

••• Dare Obasanjo analyzes the need for proactive management of database caching to achieve adequate performance in his In-Memory Caching: Why We Can't Just Trust the Database to get it Right post of 11/9/2008.

•• Shawn Wildermuth reduces the mystery quotient of handling Web service endpoints in his Controlling Service References in Silverlight 2 post of 11/7/2008.

• Mike Ormond completes his recommended PDC 2008 sessions series with Some Reflections on PDC 2008 - Must Watch Sessions (Day 3) of 11/7/2008.

Mike Ormond’s Some Reflections on PDC 2008 - Must Watch Sessions (Day 2) lists his favorite Tuesday sessions. Some Reflections on PDC 2008 - Must Watch Sessions (Day 1) does the same for Monday.

Jim Nakashima demonstrates Silverlight MediaElement Playing a Video stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage in this 11/5/2008 post.

(Repeated from the “SQL Data Services (SDS) and Cloud Computing” topic.)

Erik Reitan posted ASP.NET Controls for Silverlight – Documentation to the ASP.NET User Education blog on 11/5/2008. You might want to add this blog, which has relatively infrequent posts, to your reader.