Martyn Bullerwell's blog : Visual Studio

LINQ

Martyn Bullerwell — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:49:00 GMT

The LINQ Project is fast becoming one of the most anticipated integrated technologies in Visual Studio 2008 (ORCAS). LINQ is simply a set of extensions to the .NET framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities.

Microsoft have seen that the next big challenge in programming technology is to reduce the complexity of accessing and integrating information that is not natively defined using OO technology. The two most common sources of non-OO information are relational databases and XML.

Put simply, the new extensions, allow you to easily perform database type queries directly in code! Standard query operators allow queries to be applied to any IEnumerable<T> based information source.

Here are some sample snippets, taken straight from Microsoft's web site...

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Collections.Generic;

class app

{
static void Main()

{
string[] names = { "Burke", "Connor", "Frank",
"Everett", "Albert", "George",
"Harris", "David" };

    IEnumerable<string> query = from s in names
    where s.Length == 5
    orderby s
    select s.ToUpper();

foreach (string item in query) Console.WriteLine(item);
}
}

As you can see in this very simple snippet of code, the idea is to mimic syntax of T-SQL, and if it is as good as it looks so far we may have a lot more to say on it....

I'm sure there will be more to come!

ORCAS CTP..... What's in it?

Martyn Bullerwell — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:23:00 GMT

The March CTP release of ORCAS (Visual Studio 2008) incorporates a number of new and exciting technologies, as well as enhancing some of the older greats. The current release of the IDE implements tools and functionality supporting LINQ (Microsoft's .NET Extensions, Language Integration Query), AJAX, Windows Presentation Foundation (codenamed CIDER), Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and the .NET framework 3.5 (downloaded separately). According to Microsoft the latest framework will support applications built in .NET 2.0 and 3.0. Further to this raft of newly integrated features, it also extends role-based and Team System collaboration features.

Traditionally, Microsoft offers a Go Live license at beta 2, and that will almost certainly be the case here. Microsoft have saturated the market with new capabilities, and many of these platforms and technologies represent the culmination of years of work.

More on LINQ and ORCAS in coming posts...

Visual Studio 2008 and Javascript Intellisense

Martyn Bullerwell — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 13:59:52 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 (Codname ORCA) has intorduced a new feature to aid with Web development, official release date has not yet been announced, however a BETA 2 is due to released later this year.

One of the most publicied, and simplistic enhancement to the Visual Studio 2008 enviroment is the somple introduction of intellisensce with Javascript.

You can read more about this here and here.