It looks like the next 2+ months are officially LINQ months on my calendar.
If you happen to be going to the Heartland Developers Conference, I'll be doing 2 LINQ based talks on Thursday, Oct. 26th.
The Visual Basic Intro to LINQ presentation
Intro To LINQ - Reinventing Visual Basic
Track : Store It
Day : 1 (2:30PM - 4:00PM)
DonXML Demsak
Reinventing Visual Basic Introduction to .Net Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and its effect on how you will write programs with VB 9.0. Is object oriented programming the problem? Is functional programming a solution?
Plus I'm covering for Kent Tegels, and doing my version of this talk that he had submitted. Kent can't make it to a conference in his (now former) hometown. He is on assignment with DevelopMentor, so I volunteered to cover the topic.
Entities, Datasets and Objects, Oh My: Making sense of the Microsoft Data Platform Vision.
Track : Store It
Day : 1 (5:00PM - 6:30PM)
DonXML Demsak
As Developers, we're now challenged with three different ways of dealing with data and a number of platforms for working with it. In this session, we will look at LINQ to DataSets, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to Entities (Entity Data Framework)
Then, I'll be doing an updated version of the Microsoft Data Platform Vision (aka LINQ to Relational Data) talk at the Nov. 21st, 2006 meeting of the NJ SQL Server User Group.
And finally, I'll be doing the Intro to LINQ - Reinventing Visual Basic at the Dec. 21st 2006 meeting of the NYC .Net User Group.
Do not come to these events expecting to be force feed LINQ. What I'm trying to do with these talks to get developers to think about how we are developing code, and how we can improve the process. LINQ brings functional programming into the very procedural (and object oriented) enterprise development world and in doing so, will cause us to re-think the way we write code. These talks (especially the user group ones) are excellent opportunities for you to give me some feedback on LINQ. The LINQ team is very interested in hearing the feedback from developers "in the field", and are looking for feedback, either thru me, or through the LINQ News Groups. One of my big complaints is with the example code in the CTPs. There is a lot of information there (a lot more than the average developer can digest while holding down a fulltime job), but it is definitely lacking one great example that steps you through the development cycle from using LINQ to Datasets, to LINQ to SQL, and then LINQ to Entities. Each of the current examples uses different databases or different parts of the same database, and doesn't provide a continuous learning process. Yes, these are all CTPs and things are changing quickly, so I'd expect continuity issues, but I thought I'd bring up the point so we can have a better teaching experience in the future, as this is a hard enough topic to teach on its own. Oh, another missing part, how to create your own extension libraries with LINQ.
Update - The presentations and sample code can be found here.