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!

Dude! You're gettin' a Dud!

Ever wonder where the "Dell Dude" went? I suspect he's on the factory assembly line as evidenced by my sister & brother-in-law's recent experience with Dell.

Flashback to March of this year. My nephew orders a new Dell laptop for his mom and dad, knowing the convenience that a laptop and wireless connection can afford. I happened to be there when it arrived and so, being the family "tech" guy, offered to help get things up and running. One small problem though - it was dead as a doornail right out of the box.

Should'a taken that as a bad sign right there. But being the optimists and having a reasonably good experience in contacting them (not a lot of waiting or run around) the decision was made to ship it back for a replacement.

Fast-forward to October. The Dell goes dead again, refusing to boot up. Calls ensue and a local technician comes by to render a verdict that it's a goner - the motherboard is kaput. At this point my brother-in-law contacts Dell looking for a replacement - as in a new laptop. And considering it didn't quite go six months I think he's got a pretty strong argument - after all he's now faced with the aggravation of having lost whatever content was on the laptop plus being without one again for a period of time. However, Dell felt that things would be just fine with a refurbished laptop and proceeded to quote chapter and verse from their fine print.

You know, if you're thinking of buying a Dell as a holiday gift I'd suggest that instead of contacting the company simply go online to one of the "dented and scratched" retailers and pick one up there. At least that way you'll end up with a refurbished computer that you didn't pay full retail price for...

Cleaning the Studio

If you use Visual Studio you know the "Start" page has a listing of your most recently accessed projects/solutions. While it's not a major issue I find at times that I'd like to remove some of these items. For example, if I've been creating some scratch type projects to try out some ideas, or if I created a solution and added in several existing projects as part of the solution, then you end up with a ton of clutter making the MRU list a little less effective.

While it's possible to manipulate the registry to adjust what appears in the list, there is a sweet piece of free code by Bobby DeRosa that is an add-in to VS 2005/2008 that makes this a breeze. You get a "Clear Recent Projects" item from the File menu in VS, which provides a simple interface listing the MRU objects with checkboxes adjacent to them. You simply check the ones you want remove and click the Clear button and - viola! - your list now contains only what you want!