It's fair to say that I'm a pretty heavy user of Linq. You'll find uses of it scattered across my code, from the obvious (using DLinq to query a database) to the slightly more exotic (writing queries over collections obtained from classes in System.Reflection). Linq often allows you to express a problem very neatly, resulting in compact, readable code. It also factors out the application of operations and leaves you to worry about the operations themselves, likely decreasing bugs.

Fixing A Bug

Today I ran across some code that took a parameter, then used it in a Linq query. Omitting the clutter, it looked something like this:

public void Lookup(string URL, ref int ID, ref int Status)
{
    // ...stuff...
    var Result = from D in DB.Datas
                 where D.URL == URL
                 select D;
    // ...more stuff...
}

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The final part of our C# 3.0 series is about Linq - Language Integrated Query.

Learn:

• What declarative programming is
• How to write Linq queries
• How to use ordering, joins, groups and query continuations
• What DLinq and XLinq are

Read it now!

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This morning I started working on a new library for a new feature we'll be rolling out in the not too distant future. It is the first production code that we're developing at PH using Visual Studio 2008, which brings us C# 3.0 and Linq.

Just one morning into it, it already feels like a vast improvement. It took all of ten minutes to get the DLinq classes generated in Visual Studio; it would have taken under five if it hadn't been my first time doing it and working it out as I went. Then they were ready to use, which was also trivial. No more writing SQL or stored procedures or calling methods on a data reader to get the data out: just instantiate the DataContext (which represents the database), write the query, and it's done.

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