Modern .NET Development and The Joy of Simple LINQ to SQL

Microsoft.com Operations Team Blog — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:01:47 GMT

Introduction – Modern .NET Development It took me a while to realize it, but Microsoft .NET application

re: Modern .NET Development and The Joy of Simple LINQ to SQL

Mark — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:01:54 GMT

Good blog. But I'd have to say linq syntax is not intuitive to me and nothing in msdn has helped. I think the problem is you can't do much just from seeing a few examples. You also need to understand the full syntax as well.

re: Modern .NET Development and The Joy of Simple LINQ to SQL

Eric — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:42:41 GMT

Hi, Mark. Thanks for the comment. I totally agree with you -- LINQ is not very intuitive to apply. And the examples don't help that much, because it is a deep subject about a sophisticated, powerful .NET feature.

First you have the many different varieties of LINQ: SQL, DataSet, XML, Objects, Entities. Each one of these seems to have its own nuances and is applicable in different scenarios. You can read about these but actually experimenting seems to be key. The first time I tried to apply LINQ, I did not have much time to explore it, and ended up not using it. In my second run at it, I had more time. But, it took me quite a while to distill what I needed from numerous examples and make enough sense out of it to get the job done. An important factor for me was that I was only reading data, and not writing it. I hear that if you need to read and write, it makes sense to employ the Visual Studio 2008 Object Relational Designer and use LINQ to Entities. The entities end up being logical representations of business objects in your data store.

MSDN’s “LINQ to SQL: .NET Language-Integrated Query for Relational Data” article could help you. Also, www.linqpad.net is a useful tool for exploring the syntax and the examples are pretty good in there.

Good luck,

Eric