LINQ...

Language INtegrated Query...

It's the first thing I wrote about in this blog.  I'm completely sold on the importance of this technology, and I still assert it will have a serious impact on many, many applications written for the .Net Framework, but the shipping product is just not complete, and it's incomplete in some really annoying ways.More...

The other day a friend and I were discussing blog and forum software, and whether there were any good combination blog/forum products out there that were reasonably priced.

We'd both tried CommunityServer and found it was not really appropriate for our needs, and neither of us knew of any other prominent alternatives.  The reasoning for our discussion was that we'd both noticed a potential for dual-use web sites offering both blog and forum features; sort of a "here's what I think...discuss amongst yourselves" kind of an approach.

He is off now investigating the hazards of writing his own forum software, but while we were looking into ways to potentially allow single sign-on between BlogEngine.Net and [insert your favorite forum software here], we noticed something interesting...More...

After lots of procrastination, I finally decided I was being left behind by the .Net community and started researching LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) and its underlying technologies - anonymous methods, anonymous types, lambda expressions (predicates and assignments), and extender methods etc. Ironically, I purchased an APress’ Pro LINQ exactly one day before finding out that Microsoft had made Introduction to Microsoft LINQ freely available (or nearly so - you need a Passport account, and have to aquiesce to a short personal info questionnaire). I don’t feel like my APress dollars were wasted, however. Their treatment of the different classes of LINQ (-to Objects, -to ADO.Net, -to XML, etc.) appears to be fairly exhaustive, where the ‘Intro’ volume looks like it lays the groundwork for the technology. One of the items that caught my eye immediately was the concept of extender methods, which allow developers to change the behavior of existing types - even (or perhaps particularly) sealed ones. Now, that’s an excellent idea.  More...