Well last evening was the season opener of CMAP's "Hands On" group, a session designed to take an interesting IT Development topic and explore it as a group. Christopher Steen is heading up the effort and had located some exercises designed to acquaint us with LINQ, and we had a pretty good turnout down at TEK Systems by BWI airport. LINQ, which stands for Language Integrated Query, is one of those technologies that at first you may tend to place on the "down the road" list since it requires the .NET 3.5 framework and (I believe) C# 3.0 at a minimum. And for a lot of developers we are just now getting that platform go ahead from our workplaces. However, after last evening's review I am definitely looking to take this off of my roundtuit list and adding it to the ASAP list! A big plus is the ease with which it allows you to work with your objects, lists, and XML documents in addition to database objects. It allows you to retrieve the data in many ways, readily applying filters and sorting. It simply is one of those technologies that comes along and you get a nerd high because it's so cool! And if that were not enough there is also a great (free!) tool to help demonstrate LINQ examples. LINQPad by Joseph Albahari is a compact utility that allows you to explore (and execute) sample LINQ syntax against his sample database or one of your own choosing. And what better way to learn a new language syntax than by examples? If the next Hands On meeting is anything like this it's not going to be long before it'll be SRO at these gatherings!
Friday, November 21, 2008
Learning LINQ
Well last evening was the season opener of CMAP's "Hands On" group, a session designed to take an interesting IT Development topic and explore it as a group. Christopher Steen is heading up the effort and had located some exercises designed to acquaint us with LINQ, and we had a pretty good turnout down at TEK Systems by BWI airport. LINQ, which stands for Language Integrated Query, is one of those technologies that at first you may tend to place on the "down the road" list since it requires the .NET 3.5 framework and (I believe) C# 3.0 at a minimum. And for a lot of developers we are just now getting that platform go ahead from our workplaces. However, after last evening's review I am definitely looking to take this off of my roundtuit list and adding it to the ASAP list! A big plus is the ease with which it allows you to work with your objects, lists, and XML documents in addition to database objects. It allows you to retrieve the data in many ways, readily applying filters and sorting. It simply is one of those technologies that comes along and you get a nerd high because it's so cool! And if that were not enough there is also a great (free!) tool to help demonstrate LINQ examples. LINQPad by Joseph Albahari is a compact utility that allows you to explore (and execute) sample LINQ syntax against his sample database or one of your own choosing. And what better way to learn a new language syntax than by examples? If the next Hands On meeting is anything like this it's not going to be long before it'll be SRO at these gatherings!
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