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When I first created this site, I used it both as a test bed for technologies as I played with them and as a repository for others to use for my presentations and other insights. Over the years people have been free to grab these samples, but haven’t had good ways of giving back to help improve the samples. In the mean time, there have been quite a number of technology changes. While I may have been late to the party on some, there’s only so many things one can focus on. One of the advances we’
As I spend more time reviewing code with clients and on public forums, I’m constantly seeing cases where people have issues with Outer joins in LINQ and the various flavors of LINQ. In this post, I’m going to look at a couple options from a syntax perspective that you can use to make working with outer joins easier with LINQ. Naturally, we have a much deeper discussion of outer joins in our book that you’re welcome to dig into as well. Typically, if you do a join in LINQ, it will perform an inne
Coming from LINQ to SQL, I’ve long been a fan of its logging simplicity where you just set the context.log to a stream (console.out) to see the stream of sql statements being issued to the database. Prior to EF6, this has been a rather frustrating omission that has finally been rectified with EF 6. Now, you can log SQL statements just as simply, but with a slightly different implementation. In EF, you set the DbContext’s Database.Log property to an Action delegate that takes a string as input pa
I’ve recently been doing a fair amount of work with exposing queryable structures using ASP.Net Web API. In a nutshell, Web API allows you to expose not only the data from a service request, but also the query structure that can be extended. By default, the Web API scaffolding generates Get(id), Get, Post, Put and Delete methods. Of these, the most interesting, from a query perspective, is the Get method that returns a list of values: Public Function GetCustomers() As IEnumerable(Of Customer)
I’m often tasked with creating a tree representation of a structure from a flat self-referencing table. For example, in the EF extensions to Northwind, they extended the Employee table so that it has a self-referencing “ReportsTo” column. As you can see from the data below, Andrew Fuller does not report to any other employees, but Nancy, Janet, Margaret, Steven, and Laura all report to Andrew (because their ReportsTo value is the same as Andrew’s EmployeeID). Likewise Michael, Robert, and Anne a
I was reviewing a Stack Exchange message regarding the Aggregate clause in VB () where they found that the query was issuing multiple requests to the database and occasionally returning the entire database table to memory and using LINQ to Objects over the result. I also found that Frans Bouma blogged about this back in 2008 at  . Consider the following LINQ query over Northwind: Dim query = Aggregate o in Orders             
Although I’ve been writing primarily about RX here for a while, I still dig into some good old LINQ to SQL / EF quite a bit. Along the way, I’m frequently finding more tidbits to throw in the toolbox and thought I’d share some observations from a recent performance tuning project. (I’ll avoid disclosing the client and will change the database model to Northwind for this discussion protect the guilty.) In this project, I was brought in at the end of the project as things started going south to
When demonstrating the LINQ tools, I typically start out showing the LINQ to SQL visualizer that’s available with the C# Samples. Today I saw that Raja Venkatesh has released a Visualizer for ObjectQuery<T> (aka. LINQ to Entities). As you do with the other visualizers, you enable this by simply saving the AnySourceEntityQueryVisualizer.dll to your Visualizers directory. )Note: :the download page specifies to copy it to your C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Package
One question that I'm asked repeatedly is, "Is LINQ dead?" The quick answer is, NO. The more appropriate question is "Is LINQ to SQL dead?" That one is a bit trickier, particularly after some of the blog posts from the data programmability team regarding their emphasis moving forward for LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework. My take on it is that LINQ to SQL is in a similar situation to Winforms. Both are still supported and have teams dedicated to them, but don't expect much in terms of new fe
Last week, I announced that my translations of the Entity Framework samples were available in VB. Today the ADO.Net team announced that next set have been posted. These are part of the ADO.Net Entity Framework Documentation Samples. These are the projects that are used in the EF quick start and walkthroughs that come with the .Net documentation. They are a set of mini applications demonstrating using EF within the context of an application. The Course Manager sample was previously translated, bu
For those Visual Basic users out that that have struggled with the fact that the samples were only available in C#, you can now rejoice. There are a number of projects that have now been translated into Visual Basic for your learning pleasure. You can find these samples on the MSDN Code Gallery’s Entity Framework page. At this point the following projects have been translated. Entity Framework Query Samples Compatible with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Visual Basic and C#
I had the pleasure of reviewing an early release of Julie Lerman's Programming the Entity Framework. Julie just reported that it has just been sent to print. Having published LINQ in Action last year, I know what a relieve it can be to get a project of this size out the door.
It is a good read full of information that is only possible to gain by using it in real life applications. She's done a good job not only of presenting the framework, but also giving recommendations on how to use it in a v
As I was preparing a presentation recently, I started hitting my head into a brick wall when trying to change the namespace on the entities generated by the Entity Framework. Having spent so much time with LINQ to SQL, I was anticipating that the behavior would be similar enough to make this easy. Unfortunately, I was mistaken. First, what I tried to do wrong. With LINQ to SQL, if you click the unused design surface, you can set the namespace for the Context separately from the Entities through
I've been playing with the Windows 7 Beta1 since they came out. So far, I've been really impressed with what I'm seeing. I've installed quite a bit and have put a full development environment on it including Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
So far, the only real thing I've seen is a small bug in the LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entity Framework design surfaces. In these, if you move the mouse over one of the entities on the designer, the entity may dissappear.
There's a quick work-around fo
Last month, a document describing ADO.Next was published and quickly pulled. A new version was just posted to http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/. I read the original document, but neglected to save a copy of it before it was pulled. Skimming over the new ADO.Next document and the ADO Entity Framework documents, that were posted on 6/15, I see that there appear to have been a number of significant changes made in the last month. I hope to read through them more thoroughly in the near future and comm
