Fabrice's weblog

.NET 3.5 SP1 LINQ improvements

Fabrice Marguerie — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:24:00 GMT

In May, I announced the changes related to LINQ that were included in .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta. Now that the SP1 is officially available, more changes have been announced.

The originally announced changes were:

The support for SQL Server 2008
The release of a new flavor of LINQ: LINQ to Entities, which comes with the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Dinesh Kulkarni announces new changes:

Performance improvements for LINQ to Objects queries
Cast<T> breaking change
Performance improvements for LINQ to SQL

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

The greatest thing since google.com: goosh.org, the unofficial Google command line

Fabrice Marguerie — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:01:00 GMT

If you want to experience Google's search differently, head to http://goosh.org. You'll be able to search Google from a web command line. It's simple and fast.

Here is how to get started:

type your search keywords and press ENTER
hit ENTER again or type m for more results
type a result's number or click on its link to navigate to it
type h or man to learn more about what's possible

Your chance to win all of Manning's .NET ebooks

Fabrice Marguerie — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:28:00 GMT

If you're a tech books reader, you may have noticed that over the last few years, Manning has been publishing a lot of books (and ebooks) covering .NET.
Given all the good reviews Manning books are receiving, it looks like they are not too bad... As a Manning author, I'm a bit biased of course :-)

In any case, the point of this post is to announce their new competition: The .NET Daily Drawing.
It all starts on June 19. This promotion will run for one month, until July 17. "Each day’s lucky winner can choose one free .NET ebook of their choice. And finally, on the last day of the drawing, we're awarding one lucky winner... the entire Manning .NET library! (That’s nearly a $3000 value...)"

Sounds worth it, don't you think!

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

What is the best book about C# 3.0 and LINQ?

Fabrice Marguerie — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:59:00 GMT

Eggheadcafe.com readers' poll declares LINQ in Action "The best book about C# 3.0 and LINQ".

The poll is still open, so feel free to give your opinion.

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

XAML markup formatting in Visual Studio

Fabrice Marguerie — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:32:00 GMT

I'm using WPF these days, and so reading and writing a lot of XAML markup. As with any code or text, reading and navigation are made easier with a clean format. In my XAML files, I've been putting the XML attributes aligned vertically, below their XML element. It looks like this:

Compare the above to the following, where the attributes are all on one line:

The good news is that Visual Studio can help you to format your XAML markup without having to do too many manual adjustments. Laurent Bugnion shows how in a blog post. You simply have to change the default settings for XAML documents, and then use CTRL+E,D (Edit | Advanced | Format Document) or CTRL+E,F (Edit | Advanced | Format Selection).
The only thing different in my settings compared to Laurent's ones if that I uncheck "Position first attribute on same line as start tag".

While you're at it, you can check "Always open documents in full XAML view" (below Miscellaneous), if like me you're fed up with the painful designer, which is trying to display something by default.

Of course, it's all a matter of taste, and the choice is up to you.

PS: If you need more options, you can use the Dimebrain Markup Tamer addin.

.NET sessions at the Université du SI and .NET 3.5+ expertise

Fabrice Marguerie — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:09:00 GMT

I announced in April that I'll be part of the Université du Système d'Information event on July 2 and 3. With Frédéric Schäfer, we're actively preparing our session, which will allow you to discover in action no less than .NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ, WPF and Silverlight.

On Octo's blog, Frédéric gives the complete list of sessions that will cover .NET (in French).

I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that I'm available to give presentations and training about the above technologies and products. If you're getting started with VS 2008, C# 3.0, .NET 3.5 and the accompanying tools, feel free to contact me!

J'ai annoncé début avril ma participation à l'événement Université du Système d'Information, organisé par Octo. Avec Frédéric Schäfer, nous sommes actuellement en pleine préparation de notre session, qui vous permettra de découvrir en action pas moins que les technologies et outils .NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ, WPF et Silverlight. Notre session d'une heure et demie se présentera sous la forme du développement en direct d'une application d'exemple utilisant les technologies sus-citées.

La session que nous allons présenter n'est pas la seule abordant .NET parmi la soixantaine que comprend l'événement. Frédéric reprend d'ailleurs la liste des sessions traitant de .NET sur le blog d'Octo :

Building Web Applications Using Volta par Erik Meijer (Microsoft)

Les défis de l'utilisation de LINQ to SQL par Guy Barette (Indépendant)

Survol des nouvelles techniques d'accès aux données de Microsoft par Guy Barette (Indépendant)

Séparation des préoccupations: Nouveautés pour diminuer le couplage et augmenter la cohésion par Mario Cardinal (Indépendant)

Futur de Java et Csharp par Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine (Sun) et Vincent Guigui (Octo)

L'avenir est aux technologies vectorielles ! par Christian Blavier (Octo) et Eric Groise (Octo)

Venez expérimenter en direct les dernières innovations de .NET par Fabrice Marguerie (Indépendant) et Frédéric Schäfer (Octo)

J'aimerais profiter de l'occasion pour annoncer que je suis disponible pour donner des présentations ou des formations sur les technologies couvertes durant notre session. Si vous démarrez avec VS 2008, C# 3.0, .NET 3.5 et les outils qui les accompagnent, n'hésitez-pas à me contacter !

A negative review for LINQ in Action

Fabrice Marguerie — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:37:00 GMT

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.

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

7 tricks to simplify your programs with LINQ

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 22 May 2008 01:55:00 GMT

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 :-)

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

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

Fabrice Marguerie — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:43:00 GMT

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."

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

LINQ in Action Second Printing!

Fabrice Marguerie — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:59:00 GMT

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!

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

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

Fabrice Marguerie — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:59:00 GMT

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.

Great fluent interface sample: the fluent repeater

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:52:00 GMT

I'm not that much a fan of fluent interfaces, but in some cases they are well fit.

A great example is the fluent repeater created by Adrian Aisemberg. It's also a good example if you don't know what a fluent interface is.

Here is sample code that uses it:

Repeat.Call<string>(Save).WithParameters("myfile.txt").UntilSucceeds.Start(10);
Repeat.Call(Ping).PauseBetweenCalls(2000).Start(100);

Some more:

Repeat.Call(Open).InBackgroundThread.At(ThreadPriority.Lowest).
OnSuccessCall(Opened).OnExceptionCall(Failed).Start();

This could be written in the following way using a non fluent interface:

Repeater repeater = new Repeater();
repeater.Method = Open;
repeater.InBackgroundThread = true;
repeater.ThreadPriority = ThreadPriority.Lowest;
repeater.Success += Opened;
repeater.Exception += Failed;
repeater.Start();

Which version do you prefer?

To var or not to var

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:24:00 GMT

C# 3.0 and VB.NET 9.0 introduced implicit typing. When you use anonymous types, it's required. The rest of the time, it's mostly a judgment call to decide whether to use implicitly-typed local variables or not.
An interesting discussion is going on about this on Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo's blog. See all the comments.

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

Google killed me

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:16:00 GMT

In March and April, Google made a big update to its search algorithm. This update, nicknamed "Dewey", hit many websites. The result for these websites being a drastic decrease in search results ranking. The rankings have even changed a lot over the last weeks, sites moving up and down in search results. This is known as the Google Dance syndrome.

Given the domination of Google in search, this kind of update is something really feared by webmasters. Your very successful website can fall in disgrace all of a sudden because Google decides it should not appear at the top of search results any longer.
This is what happened to my websites, SharpToolbox.com and JavaToolbox.com. When a site used to get 1000 visits, it now receives around 330. 2/3 of the traffic is lost! I hope this will improve, but I don't see any sign of this. It's too bad that you work hard to develop websites, and lose almost everything in one day...

To evaluate the rankings of my sites, I search for keywords such as ".NET tools", "dotnet tools" or "Java tools". SharpToolbox and JavaToolbox now appear several pages behind, when they used to appear on the first page for these keywords. Incidentally, my rankings are still good on Yahoo, and not so good on Live. But this is of minor importance because, 2/3 of the traffic was coming from Google, the rest from referring links or by direct access. Almost none of my traffic is coming from other search engines.

Have you been hit by this Google update too? Would you have ideas on how to survive it?

Université du SI Octo Technology

Fabrice Marguerie — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:44:00 GMT

On July 2 and 3, Octo organises in Paris an event for "geeks and bosses" of information systems. Speakers will include no less than stars such as Neil Armstrong, Michel Serres, Eliyahu Goldratt, and Bjarne Stroustrup.

With Frédéric Schafer, I will give a presentation about the ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ and WPF. Here is its description:

Come and see live how to develop an application using the latest .NET innovations

2008 brings a wealth of novelties to the .NET platform, notably in the data access field. Microsoft indeed provide their own solution for objet–relational mapping with the Entity Framework.

How does this framework allow us to persist business objects?
How does it integrate with recent object manipulation and presentation frameworks such as LINQ and WPF?

We will address these questions in practice, by developing live a sample multi-layer application based on these frameworks.

OCTO organise à Paris les 2 et 3 juillet 2008 un séminaire à l'attention "des geeks et des boss" du Système d'Information.
Pour cette première édition, OCTO Technology sera entouré d’intervenants prestigieux : Neil Armstrong, ingénieur, pilote, astronaute, et premier homme à avoir marché sur la lune, Michel Serres, philosophe et membre de l’Académie Française, Eliyahu Goldratt, père de la théorie des contraintes, Bjarne Stroustrup, inventeur du C++, et de nombreuses autres personnalités du monde de l’IT.
OCTO a souhaité la réunion lors du même événement de tous les acteurs de son métier : Directeurs des Systèmes d'information, Architectes, Chef de projet, Responsables Métier et leurs représentants MOA ou Développeurs.

Pour cette première édition OCTO, ses partenaires et ses speakers proposent plus de 50 sessions (parcours libre) où vous pourrez construire vous même votre agenda personnalisé. Parallèlement l'université du SI propose 3 parcours formation de deux jours.

Avec Frédéric Schafer, je ferai une présentation à sur ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ et WPF. En voici la description :

Venez expérimenter en direct les dernières innovations de .NET

2008 vient avec son lot de nouveautés pour la plate-forme .NET, notamment pour l'accès aux données. Microsoft apporte en effet sa réponse au problème du mapping Objet – Relationnel avec Entity Framework.

Comment ce framework nous permet-il de persister nos objets métier ?
Comment s'interface t'il avec les récents frameworks de manipulation et de présentation d'objets que sont LINQ et WPF ?

Nous répondrons à ces questions par la pratique, en développant en direct une application d'exemple multi-couches basée sur ces frameworks.

Plus d'informations sur le blog d'Octo et sur le site officiel de l'événement.