Frans Bouma's blog

Summit was awesome! I think that word covers it. Had a great time, met a lot of great people and it was well worth it. Mr. Jetlag payed me a visit however with his little brother Johnny Cold so I'm not feeling very well, physically, at this moment, but that will be gone in a few days, I'm sure . Can't say anything about the content (NDA), other than about stuff that's already in the open, like DLinq. I wrote during the DLinq demo the same code in LLBLGen Pro 1.0.2005.1 (which is currently in beta), with even fewer lines of code. . WITH compile time checking of filters etc. It's gonna be a great authumn.

I'll be leaving for the MVP Summit in Seattle tomorrow (tuesday) morning. I hope to see you there, if you're attending as well! .

Jason Salas wonders what will happen if Google got into the developer tool business. Interesting thought which I'm sure, among other thoughts, has bounced inside Microsoft's exec's minds a couple of times. Though, with all the hoopla about Google picking up the gauntlet and heading over to Redmond to conquer the first house on Microsoft Way, one would almost forget that it would be a silly business decision to do so.

For the people who misunderstood me in my last posting: I really like Linq as a general purpose system to offer a single interface for accessing enumerable data structures.

My point in my previous posting wasn't to rant about Linq, as I truly like it, my point was that the video gave me the idea as if they believed they had invented something like O/R mapping, an OO overview of your relational model and a compile-time checked query system. I can do that today, so that's nothing unique. .

I just watched this video, where Anders Hejlsberg explains to Channel 9 what Linq is. I couldn't help it but think "Why is everyone at Microsoft doing as if they've invented something new, or hearing from it for the very first time?". Also read the comments below the video on channel 9... I seriously doubt it if some people ever look beyond what they get from Microsoft. . I like Linq's general structure, and I think it's a step forward, but please... drop the act as if you all discovered something no-one has thought of before, especially in the department where databases come into play.

Read more here: Miguel's blog. It's sad that INETA apparently isn't as independent as they claim to be...

Ok, everybody and his/her brother has blogged about Linq already so why not ramble some words about linq here? .

First, Linq itself. Linq is cool. It's a system to build language constructs inside C# or VB.NET. For the people who haven't waded through the .docs describing Linq in detail, you can see it as operator overloading on steroids: define your own language constructs with C#/VB.NET language constructs in a typed way, so that you can write simple queries or functions over data, which resolve to your own structures, expression trees, or to plain C#, VB.NET, whatever you can think of.

Code project is a great site. From time to time, real gems are posted and it's a shame a large part of the developers out there simply overlook these must-read articles.

One of these gems was posted today: Time-managent tips for developers.