Ferracchiati's blog

I'm happy to announce my new book: LINQ for VB 2005. I've translated my previous book that uses C# to VB.NET changing some book's sections. This was necessary because LINQ's support in VB 2005 is different from C#. Exactly, it doesn't provide some features such as lambda expression and other minor stuff. By the way, the book shows how to obtain the same results of the C# counterpart but with more code. You can take more information and, eventually, buy it at this site.

I tested the code that ships with my book and there are some modifies to do in order to let it work with the January CTP release of Visual Studio "Orcas". That's because not all the LINQ's functionalities have been added to this release of Visual Studio.

First of all, LINQ to SQL has not been integrated at all, there is no way to create entity classes using SQLMetal tool because there isn't the tool in Visual Studio (the same for DLinq designer).

Second, System.Query, System.XLinq and System.Expressions namespaces are not longer available. You have to use the System.Linq, System.Xml.Linq and System.Linq.Expressions namespaces instead, respectively.

Third, assemblies are not available in the Visual Studio's Add References dialog box list; you have to manually add from C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5.11209 selecting System.Core.dll that contains LINQ's base query functionalities and System.Xml.Linq.dll that contains the LINQ to XML framework.

Rumors say that the Febraury 2007 CTP release of Visual Studio "Orcas" will contain the LINQ to SQL framework too.

Finally, I found two differences in the LINQ to Objects framework; the former is the impossibility to create a list of objects using the short form such as

List people = new List { {"ID=1", FirstName="Fabio"} };

Now you have to specify the type you are going to add to the list in this way:

List people = new List { new Person() {"ID=1", FirstName="Fabio"} };

The latter is that I didn't find the Sequence class with its static methods such as the Repeat() one.

More on that soon!

# posted by Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati @ 6:08 AM 0 comments

First of all, happy new year! At this URL is possible to download the new Visual Studio "Orcas" version (included in a virtual machine) that includes LINQ's features. I'm downloading it to try my book's samples and see if they run within this new tool as well. Stay tuned!