Fabrice's weblog

A negative review for LINQ in Action

For a change, I won't post about all the positive reviews that our LINQ book received.

Today, I wanted to post about a negative review that has been published recently on Amazon.com. This review is interesting because it's completely different than the others. It gives the book a rating of 2 stars on 5.

Here is the content of the review:

LINQ with no action

I am disappointed with this book - it did not meet my expectations. I found many examples and it is really hard to use them because the author hardly explains where all comes from and why I should go this way and not another one. It sometimes confuses why, where and for what purpose the author shows an example and whether it suits my case. It is hard to decide because there are almost no explanations about roots of examples and basic theory.
However, I am happy with the fact that more and more books about LINQ come up and I do hope to find a proper one for me. Unfortunately, for now, I have to move from one book to another one for finding a solution.

Despite this review, LINQ in Action still has an average of 5 stars on Amazon.com, based on 20 reviews. I'd like to thank everybody who took the time to post a review.
And you, what do you think about our book? Maybe you could post your own review on Amazon.com (and/or on your blog of course)?. Good or bad, I invite you to speak your mind. We can always do better, and as authors we're interested in knowing your opinion.

7 tricks to simplify your programs with LINQ

Despite what a lot of people still believe, LINQ is not all about SQL and databases. I guess it will take time before everybody gets used to it.

With his 7 tricks to simplify your programs with LINQ, Igor Ostrovsky provides great examples of small but elegant uses of LINQ (to Objects). In his post, you'll discover how to use LINQ to:

• Initialize an array
• Iterate over multiple arrays in a single loop
• Generate a random sequence
• Generate a string
• Convert sequences or collections
• Convert a value to a sequence of length 1
• Iterate over all subsets of a sequence

I believe that there are many ways to use LINQ in your everyday coding sessions that are still to be discovered :-)

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta changes for LINQ to SQL, and more

The ADO.NET team details on its blog what has changed for LINQ to SQL with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta:

Across the LINQ to SQL we have made numerous bug fixes, better SQL translation for queries comparing nullable columns in Visual Basic, and support both in the runtime and the designer for SQL Server 2008.
New SQL Server 2008 Support includes:

• Support for connecting to SQL Server 2008 databases in Server Explorer
• Drag & drop tables in SQL Server 2008 databases from Server Explorer
• Support for the following new types: Date, Time, DateTime2, DateTimeOffset, Filestream

The above is just for LINQ to SQL, but this service pack comes with lots and lots of updates and new features! The ADO.NET team also has a detailed list of what's new for Entity Framework, as well as a list of breaking changes for Entity Framework. The same kind of information can be found on the Astoria team's blog for ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria).

You can get a good overview of what's included in this service pack on Scott Guthrie's blog. There are way too many changes included to repeat them all here.

Note: Scott adds that "The debugger in VS 2008 SP1 has also been improved to provide more debugging support for evaluating LINQ expressions and viewing results at debug time. LINQ enabled data sources now have a "Results View" node show up within the debugger watch window.  Expanding this node will evaluate a LINQ expression and allow you to examine the materialized objects it returns."

LINQ in Action Second Printing!

LINQ in Action is doing well. We're all happy with the sales and all the reviews, on Amazon (5 stars on average) or on blogs.
In fact, the book is doing so well that the publisher has to do a second printing! We didn't expect that it would happen so soon :-)

We've updated the text where needed, according to the errata we've collected since the first edition was published, back in February. The new files are being sent to the printer right now.
If you see something else that could be improved (for the third edition...), feel free to post a comment to the new errata page or in the forum.

LINQ in Action can be found on Manning's website (with all the details and sample chapters), on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.fr, Amazon.jp, Amazon.de, BarnesAndNoble.com, and many more online and offline bookstores!

Vidéos d'annonce de l'Université du SI Octo Technology

This is a followup to the announcement of my session at the Université du SI.

J'ai annoncé récemment ma participation à l'événement Université du SI organisé par Octo Technology les 2 et 3 juillet prochains.

Des vidéos viennent d'être mises en ligne pour présenter certaines des sessions. Voici la vidéo que nous avons enregistrée avec Frédéric pour notre session intitulée Venez expérimenter en direct les dernières innovations de .NET :

Vous trouverez plus d'informations dans mon message d'annonce et sur le site de l'événement.