Chatting about LINQ and ADO.NET Entities

Posted By: Duncan Mackenzie | Jun 9th, 2006 @ 9:41 AM

I met up with Anders Hejlsberg and Sam Druker the other day to get an overview of the May CTP of LINQ and to learn about Entities, a new concept coming in future versions of the ADO.NET stack.

Tags: ADO.NET, CSharp, LINQ, MS Personalities, SQL Server

Rating:

Views (114,885)

Comments (18)

Downloads

ali_raza_shaikh

great video Smiley

Ang3lFir3
Codito Ergo Sum

Really great video...... The deeper dives like the white boarding done here are great.... as a dev I personally really want to know whats going on under there as much as I can.... plus it really helps get a better understanding of exactly what it is I am asking to be done

I would love to just sit and listen to Anders speak about the architecture for hours lol .....

littleguru
allein, allein,... allein, allein!

Nice video. Especially the drawing on the whiteboard. Andreas has a nice hand writing...

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

Always like talks with Anders! One small thing... he was interrupted too much IMO. I would ask question and let him roll. This was a bit short also. I think they had more material.

As a side note, the May CTP is good, but still a bit buggy with Intellisence, so can't keep it installed for normal dev. Look forward to next release however. Cheers.

jreeves

This technology is going to change the way we write SQL and anlyze objects.. can't wait until it becomes mainstream.

Keith J. Farmer
My bike

staceyw wrote:

As a side note, the May CTP is good, but still a bit buggy with Intellisence, so can't keep it installed for normal dev. Look forward to next release however. Cheers.

That's just the IDE integration; you can always just compile from msbuild (msbuild foo.sln, msbuild foo.csproj, etc). I'll understand if, like me, you're addicted to the IDE Smiley

Erwyn

I posted a review of this video on my blog. Here is the entry:

Last Friday a Channel9 video appeared with Anders Hejlsberg and Sam Drucker talking about LINQ and Entities. They talk about raising the level of abstraction for programmers when programming against data. Anders makes a very good point at 6m42s that LINQ adds a level of abstraction without taking away capabilities at the bottom level (like writing your own SQL query). The loss of capabilities at the bottom often happens when the level of abstraction is being raised. Anders says: “We are very conscious of not sliding the spectrum up but growing the capabilities.”

At the end of the video (at 21m58s) we get a glimpse into the reason behind the retraction of the MSDN Article called Next-Generation Data Access: Making the Conceptual Level Real which was also about this subject. Microsoft was working on two parallel tracks (ADO.NET vNext and LINQ) on different teams and is now struggling with realigning those efforts.

The Entity concept will be part of the next version of ADO.NET. Note that I no longer call this future version ADO.NET 3.0, since this might cause confusion with the version number of the next version of the .NET Framework itself. LINQ and ADO.NET vNext will NOT be included in the .NET Framework 3.0. Instead .NET 3.0 will contain ADO.NET 2.0. Confusing isn’t it?

Johannes
Johannes Hansen, Denmark

Very nice video! As you guys mentioned earlier the whiteboard explanation really puts the idea of linq into perspective.

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

Keith J. Farmer wrote:

staceyw wrote: As a side note, the May CTP is good, but still a bit buggy with Intellisence, so can't keep it installed for normal dev. Look forward to next release however. Cheers.

That's just the IDE integration; you can always just compile from msbuild (msbuild foo.sln, msbuild foo.csproj, etc). I'll understand if, like me, you're addicted to the IDE

Unfortunately for me, I am addicted to the IDE and Intellisense. Very nice work so far. Entities sounds really interesting and helpful. Sounds a bit like Views, not sure.

BTW. It struck me today while futzing with the Datagridview, that the event model for validation and formatting is a lot of work. It would seem a better model (or additional model) would be to use attributes on the properties (i.e. declaritive model) applied to the properties of the row object. This is not totally related to Linq, but has some cross-over because the attributes could be applied to the linq objects/properties. So you could have a "Validate" attribute for range validation (similar to cmdlets) and "Format" attributes, Validation/Error Text, Help text, and/or other - ideas? These will be recognized across the framework controls. So things like the Datagridview could just "pick" them up and do the right thing for validation and formatting without any need to set events and do it manually. So it is almost like DB column constraints, but applied at the object/property level. There seems to be potential in that area.