I am starting off a new development with a lot of CRUD work, so I figured Let me use LINQ to take care of my Data layer. One curve ball became apparent when I started looking at LINQ. LINQ classes are not easily accessible to the developer, specifically not to something like adding attributes to the class. This is catastrophic is you am on using WCF, which requires both class and property attributes for serialization through WCF. Luckily I was playing with the partial class implementation for LINQ to facilitate my object structures. This proved to be the breakthrough for LINQ through WCF. By creating a partial class in the same namespace I am both able to inherit form another class and add attributes to properties I would like to be serialized. The only catch is to map the properties to the underlying LINQ class.

Now there is a great implementation!! I love Team Foundation Server. It gives one the opportunity to manage a whole team of developers of site. The tasking system links into MSProject to create task items for the developers that in turn get their tasks in the Visual Studio IDE. Reporting is made simple by linking into Excel and here is the best part. TFS creates a SharePoint portal for your clients to go and view the project status.

I have completed the TFS setup and ported all our code over into the Source control. After doing a bit of searching on the net I am able to take advantage of the brilliant team functions. Next up is the testing part.

After discovering that the server Oracle was running on is no longer functioning and needs to be formatted, my whole day was spent doing nothing. I can’t test the client install for Oracle.

I moved over to a project that uses an Oracle database. I am running Vista and Oracle 11 doesn’t go well with Vista at all, so I have been using third party trail software previously to connect to oracle. Now the software license has expired and I needed to find another solution to my connection problem.

I noticed the same vendor supplied a VS2008 plug-in version of the software so I gave that a try and came right, but my c# code still gave me a timeout to the database. I started investigating alternative drivers and came across the oracle ODAC installation.

It’s a free 200 mb download after you have registered and comes with a native driver that promises proper type conversion between .net and Oracle as well as a VS2008 plug-in. This came as a surprise to me, as I my previous search was specifically for this.