Tips/Tricks and LINQ Slides+Demos from my Talk in Dallas

I had a great time presenting for a few hours to the North Dallas .NET User Group this past Thursday.  I covered two topics:

ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and Tricks

This talk covered ASP.NET UI, AJAX, Caching and Deployment Tips and Tricks, and Visual Studio 2005 tips/tricks.  Click here to download the slides+demos for this talk.

You can learn more about the Visual Studio build performance optimization suggestions by reading this past post of mine on improving build performance.  You can also find several dozen more ASP.NET and Visual Studio Tips/Tricks of mine by browsing my past blog posts marked with the "Tips and Tricks" tag.

Building Data Driven Web Applications using LINQ

This talk provided an overview of the cool new LINQ technology that is shipping next year, and demonstrated some of the dramatic productivity improvements it will bring for ASP.NET.  Click here to download the slides+demos for this talk.

You can learn more about LINQ and how to use it with ASP.NET by reviewing some of my past LINQ posts.  Here are a few in particular worth reviewing:

Thanks again to everyone who attended my talks - I really had a great time and hope you did too!  I'd also like to give a huge special thanks to Scott Dockendorf and Rob Howard for inviting and hosting me.

Scott

 

11 Comments

  • Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to share some time with us in North Dallas! The 300+ members in attendance surely enjoyed your talk! We had a blast!

  • Thanks for the presentation! LINQ is awesome. Something occurred to me while you were demonstrating Tips/Tricks when you were adjusting the "Project Properties". One of the "pains" with using a project under source control is having multiple developers checkout the project when they have no intent of checking it out. Sure they can make it read only first. But even if they remember to do this, the changes will be lost when the project needs to refreshed. Now that Project files are MSBuild files, a cool opportunity exists to have a "User Properties" file that can be used to override Project settings when it exists and be excluded from source control. Having a VS option to open the User Properties which will only save the modified properties. Cash

  • WOW! Your presentation was awesome and enjoyed the ability to interact throughout the talk. I am so happy that a man of your ability, character and energy is in charge of our development software! Thanks and keep innovating for us.
    The only thing that we are really missing is more guidance on how to use the great technology (LINQ etc.) that your team is providing. It took us collectively forever to figure out how to best architect ASP apps, then we had to refigure out how to do it with ASP.NET and now with LINQ you guys are turning our neat little world upside down again. This time please provide us more guidance on when to use it or when not to use it and when we do use it, tell us how to architect our solutions for scale, maintainability, etc.
    Thanks again for coming to Dallas!

  • Sorry for the OT Scott; but using Outlook 2007 Beta I never get any updates to your RSS feed? I always have to add the feed - now as I only subscribe to a handfull of relatively low volumne feeds they seem to be operating properly.

  • Hello Scott:  Long-time supporter, first-time writer.  My first exposure to LINQ (and the other xLINQ flavors) was at PDC 2005; I again experienced the power of LINQ at TechEd 2006; impressed with the power, I installed LINQ and the .NET BCL 3.0.  That's where my positive views of LINQ ended.  Like most readers of your BLOG, I am a career software engineer and use my development environment on a daily basis.  The notion of BCL 3.0 on my development box excited me (in a negative way), because my servers do not have pre-RTM BCL 3.0 and my anxiety about development compilation of 3.0 playing nice with production 2.0 -- I'm sure a common concern.  I immediately uninstalled LINQ/BCL 3.0.  Now, my development code compiles and runs just fine; however, my VS TS SW DEV environment is all messed-up (a technical term ;-)).  I found some solutions online to fix the environment issues by modifing Registry settings, running the  devenv /setup, devenv /resetuserdata, etc...  Unfortunately, my environment is still 'messed up.'  I even tried a reinstall.  All other concerns aside, my biggest annoyance is the loss of the find/replace toolbar.  I cannot find the setting for this toolbar to save my life - a small concern, but a major inconvenience.  Anyway, I just thought I'd let you know some concerns from the trenches.  Thanks for listening to me vent.  Look forward to seeing you at TechEd 2007 in Orlando.

  • I currently use dataset designers a lot just to speed up development - I use the "hidden" little feature that lets me change the connection modifier so that at runtime I can change the table adapter connection strings. Will something like this be available with LINQ2E? I don't think its ever a good idea to always assume developers will have a connection string in the web.config .... either that or provide a "ConnectionString" provider model in the web.config (ideal!) :) thanks! -c

  • Can you link us to some of the basics of LINQ.

    Thanks

  • Thanks for the awesome presentation. LINQ is something I am looking forward to now. We had a Great Time. Hope to see you again at NDDNUG.

  • Hi Craig,

    The good news is that you can pass in the connectionstring directly as a constructor argument to the DataContext.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Hi Scott.

    I'm trying to figure out if DLinq will be the future of database access and I've read alot of pros/cons about the concept.

    DLinq looks like it will save alot of development time! So much so, if there are performance implications it's probably cheaper just to buy more machines.

    The main point that keeps cropping up is that DLinq uses reflection (which requires look-up tables). How that is different to look-up tables in DataReader and Table objects I don't know, but DLinq does seem to use alot of reflection.

    Will DLinq ever be useful for larger / high usage applications. With regards to attributes and reflection, can the compiler pre-calculate anything (like you see with some C++ compilers).

    Best Regards.

    Adam.

  • Hi Adam,

    LINQ actually only uses reflection once, and then caches the results. So you'll find that the performnace of it is pretty good - and only slightly slower than using raw DataReaders.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

Comments have been disabled for this content.