Goto 100 - Development with Visual Basic : LINQ

A few rough edges in our shiny new Data stack

Eric Nelson — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:52:30 GMT

We have a rather impressive set of new technologies for working with data – LINQ, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data etc.

What I am finding is… they don’t all get on with each other as well as you might have thought. My current battle is using ADO.NET Data Services with LINQ to SQL which is a) clearly something you might want to do and b) is something that isn’t going to work for you straight out of the box. I will post a collection of links which are helping me get through this later – but for now, a quick piccy of what I think I have discovered about the “out of the box” experience so far.

Another new find for me – MyVBProf.com

Eric Nelson — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:03:04 GMT

Just stumbled across this great resource of very nicely done screencasts on developing with Visual Basic 2008. Each topic area is split into a number of 10minute screencasts which are very professionally done. Great work by Bill Burrows who is a faculty member in Information Systems in the Business School at the University of Washington in Seattle. Thanks Bill.

Visual Basic vs C# LINQ syntax

Eric Nelson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:30:03 GMT

LINQ has two syntaxes – Lamda syntax and Comprehension syntax. Each has their uses and you can happily mix them.

Lamda syntax is stuff like:

var longWords = words.Where( w => w.length > 10);

Dim longWords = words.Where(Function(w) w.length > 10)

Where as Comprehension syntax is much more similar to SQL and hence it is often referred to as Query syntax:

var longwords = from w in words where w.length > 10;

Dim longwords = From w In words Where w.length > 10

Interestingly the VB and C# team each did their own work on the Comprehension syntax with different final results. The VB team did all that lovely XML literals stuff but they also did something slightly less obvious. The following VB code using Comprehension syntax to skip the first 10 Orders and then return just the next 5.

Dim q = From o In db.Orders Select o.OrderID Skip 10 Take 5

But C# has no equivalent Comprehension syntax – hence you need to use Lamda syntax.

var q = from o in db.Orders select o.OrderID;

q = q.Skip(10).Take(5);

Although I bet many of you want to write:

var q = ((from o in db.Orders select o.OrderID).Skip(10)).Take(5);

:-)

200 LINQ Samples in Visual Basic

Eric Nelson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:31:00 GMT

I recently discovered LINQPad. It is written by Joseph Albahari who wrote C# 3.0 in a NutShell and contains all the samples from his book. It is an amazing tool – and not an obvious tool to turn to if you are a Visual Basic developer. However – a certain Federico Daniel Colombo has converted all the samples to Visual Basic and Joseph has included them in the tool.

Visual Basic vs C# - early adopters favour C#?

Eric Nelson — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:26:00 GMT

This myth is typically from someone in Microsoft who thinks, codes, demos and blogs in C# and wants to justify why they might ignore Visual Basic - errrr.... such as me a few months back. Sorry.

"Sure - there may well be a lot of folks using Visual Basic .NET but they are not my audience. I am after the early adopters, the folks who will work with the newest stuff from Microsoft - and that in general just is not the Visual Basic .NET developers"

Hmmmm.....

I thought I would spend a few minutes to see how much truth there was in the above. I was looking for an article which came in Visual Basic and in C#, written at about the same time, hosted on a neutral site and which I could easily find stats about. www.codeproject.com came to the rescue, more specifically salysle.

C'# has the edge (which I did expect) but wow - looks like we have plenty of Visual Basic developers willing to use the latest stuff from us. Enjoy!

P.S. The article is well worth a read!

LINQ to SQL: Page Views - C# 6026 vs VB 4913

Simple LINQ to SQL in C#

Last Updated: 4 Jun 2008 Page Views: 6,026 Rating: 4.07 / 5 Votes: 7 Popularity: 3.44

This article provides an introduction to employing LINQ to SQL within a Windows Forms application. The article will address the incorporation of LINQ to SQL into a WinForms project, how to use LINQ to SQL to select, insert, update, and delete data, and how to use LINQ to SQL to execute stored proced

Using LINQ to SQL in Visual Basic

Last Updated: 6 Jun 2008 Page Views: 4,913 Rating: 4.20 / 5 Votes: 3 Popularity: 2.00

This article provides an introduction to employing LINQ to SQL within a Windows Forms application; the article will address the incorporation of LINQ to SQL into a win forms project, how to use LINQ to SQL to select, insert, update, and delete data, and how to use LINQ to SQL to execute stored proce

Intellisense - VB 2005 vs VB2008 + a great example of mixing VB with XML

Eric Nelson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:45:43 GMT

I had not appreciated just how much intellisense had improved between releases of Visual Basic until I spent 6mins watching this (which isn't a huge surprise as I have never coded in VB 2005).

Lisa also does a great job of showing the real power of XML Literals in VB - mixing VB code inside the XML, even LINQ code. Very, very cool.

P.S. Video quality is not great - but good enough to see what is going on.

C9 Bytes: Lisa Feigenbaum on Visual Basic 2008 IDE Enhancements

Building a "brand new application" - WPF, ADO.NET Data Services, LINQ to Entities with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Eric Nelson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:19:00 GMT

At the end of June I run workshops with 2 ISVs both looking to completely re-develop their applications. One is entirely VB6, the other a combination of VB6 with C++.

The beauty of "starting from scratch" with a one to two year development plan is you can take a hard look at the latest technologies from Microsoft - and there are a lot of them! As a result, both application architectures at a high level ended up looking pretty similar.

The following links should help those teams drill in further - and maybe you?

In both cases we went with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as our base level technology (NB: SP1 is really a feature pack)

Presentation Tier

Rich Client for power/frequent users, typically inside the firewall with the need to be occasionally connected
- Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5
  - In June we released the Composite Application Block for WPF
- ADO.NET Synchronisation Services to a local database cache
- Workflow Foundation for ....errr...workflow :-)
- Communication to middle tier via HTTP/REST
Browser Client for occasional users, typically outside the firewall
- Silverlight 2.0
- ASP.NET AJAX
- Workflow Foundation

Middle Tier

Serving both types of clients. Ability to scale out.
- ADO.NET Data Services - exposing entities and operations
  - SP1 Documentation for Data Services
- ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities - delivering object relational mapping
  - SP1 Documentation for Entity Framework
- Workflow Foundation
- Windows Communication Foundation to drive and respond to external systems
Note: We ruled out LINQ to SQL in favour of LINQ to Entities - however worth saying that in both cases we only needed to support SQL Server and therefore LINQ to SQL would be a valid alternative
- LINQ to SQL has shipped and N-tier development with it is nicely covered in the documentation and in Beths posts

Data Tier

Where we store all the data :-)
- SQL Server 2008
  - Extended via SPs, Triggers and Types using TSQL or CLR integration as appropriate

Blogs (sample of the best):

ADO.NET Team on Entity Framework http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/tags/Entity+Framework/default.aspx
ADO.NET Data Services Team http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/
Sync Framework team http://blogs.msdn.com/sync/default.aspx
UK based Mike Taulty with some great content on ADO.NET Data Services, Entity Framework and Silverlight
Tim Sneath (ex UK) on all things WPF/Silverlight http://blogs.msdn.com/tims
Product group WPF site http://windowsclient.net/
Related - SQL Server Data Services http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/default.aspx

P.S. Both teams will be using Visual Basic 2008 :-) I thought you would like that one...