Dinesh's Cyberstation

After a long break, I plan to restart blogging - but in a more personal location so I can blog about a few more things than would make sense under msdn. http://www.DineshK.net Hope to see you there Dinesh

Some of it is covered in my previous post and on Silverlight.net but here is a summary: Bits (prereq: Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Silverlight 3 beta tools for VS): RIA Services March Preview (unveiled last week at MIX) Documentation / video A PDF file with...

A few folks have asked me what I have been up to after wrapping up LINQ previews and V1. I have not been able to answer that question satisfactorily because what we were working on was non-public (well almost except the mention of now obsolete name "Alexandria...

I have been underground for a while - trying to wrap up the LINQ book and working on some exciting stuff for Silverlight. For the latter, my lips are sealed until Mix 209. For the former, it is a different story ... Last month, I finally finished all...

There are three perf improvements in the just released SP1 . As always, I will let you run your own microbenchmarks or more meaningful app-level benchmarks. LINQ to Objects: Specialized enumerable: The new implementation recognizes queries that...

This is going to be a brief one. If you are using LINQ to SQL, you should check out Damien's new templated code generator sample. One of our regrets from LINQ to SQL V1 days was not providing an easy way to tailor the code-gen. This is one step in that...

This is old story and I have used parts of it over the last three years to show how LINQ lets you navigate from relational (R) to object (O) or object to XML (X) etc. But for a forthcoming demo, I had to write some quick code today and it looked like...

Back to the "tips" series after a little break ... One common question I get is about caching of data in LINQ to SQL. It means a lot of different things so let's start with the following baseline: LINQ to SQL was designed to get you objects from the...

An unusual subject for this blog that has been mostly about components I have worked on. But the event yesterday was memorable and worth sharing. The event has been covered widely so I won't even try to broadly summarize. Insted I will list what I found...

A little break from my "LINQ to SQL tips" series of posts. A recent vote of no confidence on a related component orchestrated by community activists reminded me of many questions I have fielded and how the design team approached the design of LINQ to...

The code generated for LINQ to SQL is a set of partial classes - one for your DataContext and one per entity mapped to a table or a view. That means you have the opportunity to augment the generated code with additional code in your partial class. I often...

The common guidance for updates is to keep the original values in view state so that you can recreate the object in its original state, Attach() it and then set the values that the user has modified. This works well for the most part. But at times, a...

The DataContext is a rather careful beast. Once an object is retrieved, the DataContext will not stomp on it if a query returns the same object again. This is intentional. Imagine the chaos if you modified some of the retrieved objects or even read the...

Often I get the following questions about stored procs in LINQ to SQL: I have sproc that returns multiple results. How can I use it in LINQ to SQL? Can I use a sproc that returns results of different shapes; e.g. Customers and Orders? I drag...

I often get a question along the following lines: If I remove one of the OderDetails from Order.OrderDetails collection, I see that the reference OrderDetail.Order is set to null but this just orphans the OrderDetail; it is not deleted. How can I change...

This post is a confluence of two distinct sets of comments I got: The above-mentioned feature is a well-hidden secret; and I post code only in C# while there is a big community of VB users who like LINQ to SQL So here we go ... First, the...

A while ago (October last year), I moved from C# team to the "UI Frameworks" team inside the .NET Developer Platform team. C# team is where LINQ was incubated and large portions of LINQ were productized: LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL and C# 3.0 to be precise...

One of the frequently asked questions is about the lifetime of a DataContext. Should it be a long-lived, application-scoped object or should it be a short-lived, request-scoped object? Let's get to the answer by considering the key parameters: DataContext...

Here is another question I get quite often: I have some common fields (maybe id and timestamp) and some common behavior across all my entities. How do I handle that in LINQ to SQL? After all, the only inheritance mapping supported is Table Per Hierarchy...

I was out on vacation (Zion, Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon National Parks) so my blog went dark for a while. Also, I noticed a few comments that were incorrectly flagged by the spam filter - I have now published them, albeit after a delay. Sorry about...

There is already so much fictional/scientific/medical/... literature in English so why doesn't everyone in the world just speak English? There are so many dialects and variations of English that one has to often understand. Why bother with another language...

I keep getting a lot of questions about whether DLinq is for data objects or for business objects. There is no shortage of advice - both good and bad about what one should and should not do with DLinq. Here, I want to briefly describe what we had in...

Most of my posts have been about what is new in beta2 or RTM or how you can do great things with feature X and how bug Y has been fixed. Now that we are practically done with V1, it is time to do the somewhat unpleasant task of saying - sorry, this is...

I keep getting this question so often - "I want to do xyz. I have CRUD (Create, Read, Updated, Delete) methods on my entity class ...." Stop right there. By now I have completely forgotten about "xyz" and I am rushing to climb on my soapbox! While...

I often answer questions based on what the run-time (System.Data.Linq.dll) supports, sometimes realizing only later that the run-time feature may not be supported by the visual designer in Visual Studio. Some of these are supported by the command line...