LINQ and all things .NET 3
My thanks must go to Armand for his great talk and demo on Linq and the new language features in .NET 3.0 that drive it in the background.
I really learnt a lot and it was great to see working demo where he linked a List<Customer> with a strongly typed database object using an xml document and was able to query all three in one simple query just as if he were doing a regular SQL join. Impressive stuff.
This has inspired me to do a deep dive into each of the topics he touched on last night, including Lambda expressions (the great new cleaner way to do anonymous methods), Anonymous types (what they are and more importantly what they are NOT), Extension methods. Unless you have been living with your head in a hole recently I am pretty sure you have been bombarded with blog posts from all over the world about this stuff and figure "you've seen it a hundred times before" ... in which case feel free to ignore the series of posts to come. For those, like myself, who are not quite clear on the goodness that is coming but are very excited by the new things being introduced to the hottest language in the world then watch this space .... it's gonna get hot!
I leave you with this thought .... if Anders still get's excited like a 3 year old watching Barney, then there must be something in it yet ....