Fabrice's weblog

We have a forum for LINQ in Action, where current and future readers can post questions related to the book or to LINQ in general. Here is one question we received recently:

Here is a query I received from a user of SharpToolbox.com:

As Jim wrote, all the chapters of our LINQ book are now available through Manning's Early Access Program (MEAP). The book is now in final review and the paper version is due later this year or in January. This is great to get close to completion on this project!
Go an see the result by yourself (the first chapter is available for free in PDF).

When debugging LINQ to SQL code, did you wish you could easily see the SQL that gets executed? Of course there is the DataContext.Log property that is available for that. You can assign any TextWriter to this property. Console.Out is a good candidate for example, but it doesn't help much for web applications and doesn't integrate with Visual Studio nicely. Fortunately, Kris Vandermotten has a nice solution: DebuggerWriter. It's an implementation of TextWriter that writes to the debugger log.

You may have seen a lot of messages about the launch date for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. According to this announcement, Microsoft has planned a grouped launch event in Los Angeles for February 27, 2008.
This does not mean that all the products will be released at that same date. Some may be released after the event, others may be released before.

I've just updated my profile on proagora.com.

Patrick Smacchia, C# MVP, author of the best-seller Practical .NET2 and C#2 and creator of NDepend, has started to blog.

Ok, well, this is a catchy title, but this is the way I feel right now. When Acropolis was announced, it was supposed to become the industrialized replacement for the CAB (Composite UI Application Block) and the SCSF (Smart Client Software Factory). Unfortunately, the design focus seems to have shifted a bit. When I see the announcement of the second preview of Acropolis (July 2007 CTP), I'm very disappointed to see that the main new "features" revolve around the "fun" aspects of software applications more than around "enteprise" features. If Acropolis is here to help you create bling-bling applications, well it's not the application framework we need.