Dinesh's Cyberstation

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...

It is clear from the forums that this whole business of attaching detached objects in LINQ to SQL (DLinq) is confusing. Some of it is intrinsic, some is perhaps our design and perhaps a bit attributable to the misnomer "detached object support". More...

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...

With a tip of a hat to Rudyard and his ballad , I would say Oh SQL is SQL and C# is C#, and never the twain shall meet Till rows and objects manually a dev has both to beat But there is neither SQL nor C#, nor join nor dot When LINQ stands to link...

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...

Let's say you build an app that uses a traditional ORM concept of lazy loading. Your app binds an Order object to a grid and lets the user lazily load related objects like OrderLines. Your user - a normal cubicle dweller, queries for an Order and then...

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...

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...

At TechEd, I casually asked Bob about a recent revision of his book and a little later, a 1k page book landed on my desk - courtesy Bob. I was very impressed by the content and style.The topics range from the commonly used ones like ADO.NET v2 to more...

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...

I am taking a break from LINQ/C#-related posts for a littler detour. Today I attended Chris Anderson's talk about " The Long Tail ". We often have authors of interesting technical/business/organizational books visit the campus as a part of their book...

At PDC (and before that on ObjectSpaces project), this was a hot discussion topic. What approach is better: attributes or external source like an XML file. I would like to open up this topic beyond the 1:1 conversations at PDC to the blogosphere. I will...

Good question - in the kitchen of course! The dish is now ready on the LINQ home page and our VP - Soma has a nice blog about it already. I feel exhausted but happy to be able to share the results of "our" work with you. The word "our" in English...

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...

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...

Soon after Anders + Don demo in PDC keynote, several folks asked me about ObjectSpaces. It was one of my favorite projects (notice the past tense). But it is time to talk about its future rather than past. The future of ObjectSpaces is DLinq. We used...

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...

Orcas beta2 is here for you. This is significantly ahead of beta1 and pretty close to the final feature set of Orcas for most components. The releases are available both as regular installs and as VPC images . Now that Orcas beta2 has been released...

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...

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 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...

Here is another FAQ question that has come up at PDC. Since DLinq is a part of the next version of ADO.NET, it is natural to ask - is it connected or disconnected? After all, we have talked about connected vs disconnected components in ADO.NET quite...

A minor note - at TechEd in Orlando, many attendees decided to pronounce Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) as either "lin cue" or "lynx". Maybe we can get a cooler logo with lynx now! We pronounce it the same as "link" though! All its components are...

OK, after hibernating in the winter, I am back on the blog. Some of you joined us on DLinq chat last week so you already have a sense of what is going on. For others, here is a peek at what we are working on: Inheritance: table-per-hierarchy...