Why Not VB.NET Books?

What’s with this trend of book publishers bringing out new books on topics (such as ASP.NET, LINQ, etc) that are C# focused, and only after about 2–3 months later does the VB.NET version of the same book make an appearance?

This sucks and is totally unfair.

Recently I looking forward to some LINQ related books from APress, only to find out that they’re for C# devs. Normally this isn’t a problem, as it’s quite easy to transfer the C# code to VB.NET. But I was thinking, why the hell should I be doing this anyway? Both the C# and VB.NET books should be made available at the same time.

It's Been A While

Having not touched this blog for around 3.5 years, I thought it might be time a made another appearance!

So, with my first blog entry in a while, I thought I'd start off with a mention of a really useful utility that I came across last week called LINQPad.

If you're into writing LINQ queries then this tool will really help your LINQ skills. LINQPad isn't simply a Notepad for LINQ though, it has some really cool features.

No Need To Install

Once you download LINQPad there's no installer to run, just run the EXE itself and off you go.

Database Connectivity and LINQ To SQL Features

In this screenshot I've configured LINQPad to connect to the AdventureWorks database on my SQL Server instance:

From here I can drag tables into the query editor and use those in my queries. LINQPad automatically takes care of the underlying database connecting for you. Check out this example which returns the Title column value for all records in the Employees table:

Note the use of the Dump() method call, this displays the content of j into the LINQPad console window. This query results in the following output:

A cool feature is the SQL button found here:

Pressing this button will give you the SQL syntax for the LINQ to SQL query in the editor:

This is just a taster of how handy this utility could be for you. Check it out.