Hilton Giesenow's Jumbled Mind

Getting Started With LINQ To SQL

Considering I've put a few posts up about LINQ To SQL, I realised I've never shared some of the initial links I passed to other team members as well. If you're looking into using this technology, here are some worthwhile links to follow. Some are tutorials, some are tools, some are just worthwhile pieces to understand with this new technology. Also, some are more general LINQ-related than LINQ To SQL specifically.

Essential Reading

• http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/09/07/linq-to-sql-part-9-using-a-custom-linq-expression-with-the-lt-asp-linqdatasource-gt-control.aspx - a great series of step-by-step tutorials by Scott Guthrie that cover a lot of important basic concepts
• http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2007/12/09/deferred-execution.aspx - A post by Charlie Calvert on the C# team on Deferred Execution, a topic that can bite you if you don't know about it
• http://dotnet.org.za/hiltong/archive/2008/02/12/lazy-loading-in-linq-loadwith-and-associatewith-dataloadoptions-part-1-loadwith.aspx - Part 1 of my series on Lazy Loading with LINQ To SQL
• http://dotnet.org.za/hiltong/archive/2008/02/12/lazy-loading-in-linq-loadwith-and-associatewith-dataloadoptions-part-2-associatewith-and-tieing-both-together.aspx - Part 2 of the Lazy Loading series
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb425822.aspx - This is a pretty long paper on MSDN on DLINQ, the original codename for LINQ To SQL. It's got a lot of material, but is a bit out of date on some parts.
• Linq Tips: Retrieving an Element From a Collection - an overview of some of the methods for retrieving a single item from a table (or any collection) in LINQ and LINQ To SQL
• http://aspnetresources.com/downloads/linq_standard_query_operators.pdf a 'cheat sheet' of LINQ operations

Essential Tools

• http://www.scottgu.com/blogposts/linqquery/SqlServerQueryVisualizer.zip A Debug Visualizer to help with debugging while you're coding your LINQ To SQL projects
• Download LINQPad - SQL Query Analyzer / Management Studio for LINQ - basically a stand-alone mini IDE to work with LINQ.

Worthwhile Additional Info

• http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/dennis/archive/2007/12/28/linq-to-sql-vs-dba-s.aspx Some comments on DBA-related concerns with LINQ To SQL
• http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2007/08/31/database-performance-correctness-compostion-compromise-and-linq-too.aspx - Good general on database performance
• http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2007/06/22/dlinq-linq-to-sql-performance-part-1.aspx - An overview of how LINQ To SQL performance was tuned by MS during the development process
• LINQ- What It Means for Developers - My 5 minute Virtual Tech Ed interview overview of LINQ and LINQ To SQL
• http://dotnet.org.za/hiltong/archive/2008/02/01/why-use-linq-to-sql-part-1-performance-considerations.aspx - the 1st in a series of Why Use LINQ To SQL posts (2nd one coming soon, hopefully!)
• http://wiki.asp.net/page.aspx/86/linq-to-sql - the LINQ To SQL page on the new ASP.Net Wiki site