Author: Scott Wisniewski

The first presentation of the day is 'Linq internals with VB 9'.  The presenter is a Microsofty that made the trek out from Redmond to visit the midwest.  The goal of the presentation is to give a high level overview of Linq, and it was pulled of pretty well.

Here are some of the topics that were covered

• Showed the 'painful' way of doing data retrieval in .Net 2.0.  Then moved on to show how to accomplish the same task via Linq.
• Demo'ed how you could override Linq keywords such as Where if you wanted to override the default behavior (hey, I am sure someone will want this).
• Demo'ed XLinq, this is pretty cool.  Sadly the IDE support is ONLY for VB (damn vb guys).  Us C# devs can still use XLinq, but only via the API, we will get no intellisense.  Here are 2 postings about XLinq Steve Eichert and DonXML.  Actually had a VB developer say to me 'Finally something us VB guys have that you C# do not, we are now a first class citizen' -- Laughed

Ok, this is just my little rant on my VB syntax hates

• Using the _ as line separators
• Lack of needing () for methods (confusing anyone)
• Extension methods are ODD
• Non-case sensitive
• Lambda syntax is 'ugly'
  Function (c) c.SomeProperty = "SomeValue"

Nice overall theme, but would have liked to see more time spent on Linq it self.  There was a large percentage of time spent 'building' the test application.

Till next time,