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.

I have also been enjoying the new Lambda expression syntax and type inferencing, which has saved me a few keystrokes already and makes the code somewhat more readable (provided you recognize the new syntax, of course). Once I know that this all fits into our build process smoothly, I'll probably begin moving some other projects over the Visual Studio 2008 so we can also use the new C# 3.0 features in those. Note that we won't be re-writing things just for the sake of using C# 3.0 features in them; that's probably just a reliable way to introduce new bugs, and I'd advise against that generally unless you've got really good reasons to do it.

Don't forget that PH is currently running a series on C# 3.0; the final part, on Linq, comes out this week! I plan to follow it up with an article on DLinq; I've been holding back on that until I'd got some more practical experience using it, though.

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