I’m starting a new line of blog posts in which I’m going to give out a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up during the past years. I’m going to start with one of the most common mistakes I often face when reading code. To demonstrate that, I’m going to use LinqToSQL as my data access method (although the problem can be found in any kind of Data access technology) and use the the same model I used in my earlier Caching series. As you can see the model is very simple and contains just three entities, a Peson, its Phones and...

Bart de Smet has released a very usefully query expression translation cheat sheet this is an excellent resource if you're into Linq and want to be able to write a Linq expression in code.

One of the things that troubled me for quite a long time now was the fact that my RSS feeds were out of sync between my home and work PCs. That's because I kept forgetting to add the feeds I was subscribing from one PC to the other. And of course I didn't want to delete all feeds from either one of them cause that could result in loosing some. I had to build a small utility that, using XML DOM and XPath, would read my aggregators' OPML files and synchronize them. The problem was that I didn't have...

If you had only had tine for just one Session in this year's TechEd then I would definitely recommend Mike Taulty's one on Linq to Entities (is going to be repeated on Friday). If you didn't make it this year then I would suggest watching its replay at The virtual side as soon as it comes available. It's not just the subject (which is interesting as it is), it's also the fact that he's a great speaker, one that speaks with a lot of examples and demos and avoids lengthy power point presentations. I was lucky to see...

It's only been a couple of weeks since Linq's final release with Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 and great tools have already started coming to life. A great one I discovered from SoCalDevGal is the LinqPad - a Linq query expression tool which allows you to run queries against databases using Linq. If you're exploring Linq this is a great tool.

I've been following ADO.NET Entity Framework for over a year now and the truth is I was bit surprised when DLinq was released. From the initial look at things - it seemed as though the ADO.NET EF folks and the LINQ to SQL folks were operating in completely isolated environments - each producing their own copy of a wheel but with very different attributes, benefits, and even target audiences. From what I've been reading lately though I came to understand that that isn't the case. The ADO.NET Entity Framework has a different scope than LINQ to SQL. The ADOEF is responsible...