News

Photos

Articles

Components

Applications

Kleinkunst

LINQ articles

On this page you will find an overview of all articles that I have written myself. The more recent articles deal with software development with .NET (C#, Visual Studio, VSTS, Azure, LINQ, Entity Framework, Web services, WPF, Silverlight, ...) in particular. The older articles were often written for the purposes of courses or demonstrations at my computerclub and these articles are mostly about Delphi, PHP, databases, Javascript, Windows, Office, Multimedia applications, Atari, ...

Use the left panel to filter the more than 115 articles by category. These articles can be used freely for personal use. Placing the full articles on other websites is not allowed without the permission of the author.

.NET - New connection providers in LINQPad

Entity Framework

LINQPad was introduced in 2007 and nowadays it is a very mature tool which should be in the toolbox of every .NET developer. Version 1.35 offers new connection providers and it has native support for LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework data models. It also provides new query types like SQL and Entity-SQL. In this small article I will highlight some of the new features.

.NET - Cleaning up and organizing Outlook mailboxes

This small article contains a few C# scripts which can be executed in LINQPad to clean up and organize Outlook mailboxes. If you want to keep Outlook performing as fast as possible and to reduce the size of mailboxes then these scripts and my OutlookProvider component can simplify this job.

.NET - Querying Excel worksheets with LINQ

A while ago I was looking for a way to query Excel with LINQ. I needed a simple solution that allowed me to query tables in Excel worksheets in a tool like LINQPad. This article will describe how I implemented my ExcelProvider and it will demonstrate its features by giving an example of a LINQ query and the result in LINQPad.

.NET - ADO.NET Entity Framework : Querying metadata

Entity Framework

A few months ago I posted several articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework beta 3. In the meanwhile the Entity Framework has been officially released and a lot of resources about this technology have become available. In the last few weeks I have been taking a closer look at the metadata services. This article will demonstrate 20 examples which use LINQ to query the metadata collections of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. These queries can be used to examine the structure of your Entity Data Model or to get statistics about it.

.NET - LINQ AsHierarchy() extension method - part 2

Entity Framework

A few months ago I published an article about my LINQ AsHierarchy extension method. This extension method can be used to convert a flat collection of records to a hierarchical structure of nested collections. I got a lot of enthusiastic responses and questions so I decided to improve this technique a little further. This new article will describe the new features and demonstrates how to use the LINQ to Objects and the new LINQ to SQL AsHierarchy extension methods.

.NET - LINQ AsHierarchy() extension method - part 1

Entity Framework

This article explains how to convert data from a self referencing table (adjacency model) to a hierarchy of nested collections (nested set model). The new LINQ AsHierarchy() extension method can be used to convert data and bind it to WPF TreeViews.

.NET - ADO.NET Entity Framework & LINQ to Entities - part 3

Entity Framework

In this third part of my series of articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework I will demonstrate how to add and modify data, use change tracking and handle concurrency conflicts. I have also implemented a Dump() extension method which can be useful for displaying all change tracking information.

.NET - ADO.NET Entity Framework & LINQ to Entities - part 2

Entity Framework

Second part of my series of articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework. This article covers a few handy testing and learning tools like eSqlBlast and LINQPad. It also describes a few techniques on how to view the generated T-SQL statements when executing Entity SQL or LINQ to Entities queries.

.NET - ADO.NET Entity Framework & LINQ to Entities - part 1

Entity Framework

A few weeks ago Microsoft released Beta 3 of the ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF). The Entity Framework looks like an interesting technology which is more powerful and advanced than LINQ to SQL. I have created a small tutorial on how to start with the Entity Framework using the Northwind sample database. This first article covers the Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities. I will try to compare EF to LINQ to SQL if possible.

.NET - LINQ to SQL - part 4

Fourth part of this series of articles about LINQ to SQL (.NET 3.5). This article shows the features of the 2 provided visualizers (LINQ to SQL Visualizer & Expression Tree Visualizer), the use of the Refresh method and how to create dynamic strong-typed Where- and OrderBy-clauses. Powerful expression trees can be created easily by using the PredicateBuilder class.

.NET - WPF/Silverlight treeviews and LINQ to SQL

A few examples about .NET WPF applications using LINQ to SQL. This article will describe how to create nice looking treeviews which are populated with data using LINQ to SQL (or LINQ to Entities). Of course resources, templates, styles, datatriggers, value converters, ... will be utilized. Most examples will also work with Silverlight.

.NET - Performance comparison with Parallel Extensions .NET 3.5

First tests with the Community Tech Preview of the Parallel Extensions for .NET 3.5. A comparison between sequential and parallel execution is made on the basis of charts. PLINQ and the ParallelTask Library can surely improve the performance of .NET applications.

.NET - Display Outlook contact pictures in WPF application

In this article I will show you how to create a ValueConverter class which can be used in a WPF application to display the pictures of the Outlook contacts.

.NET - Execute queries on Office data with LINQPad

This short article is an addition to my 'Querying Outlook and OneNote with LINQ' article. It describes how you can utilize the free LINQPad tool to execute queries on Office data.

.NET - Querying Outlook and OneNote with LINQ

In this article I will describe how I developed two wrapper classes for Outlook and OneNote. These classes can be used to execute LINQ to Objects (.NET 3.5) queries on emails, appointments, tasks, contacts, notebooks, sections, pages, ... So you could call it LINQ to Outlook and LINQ to OneNote.

.NET - LINQ to SQL - part 3

Third part of this series of articles about LINQ to SQL (.NET 3.5). This article includes some useful tips about adding sequences and using variables in a LINQ query. Further more the techniques of eager loading and query compiling are covered.

.NET - LINQ to SQL - part 2

An article about LINQ to SQL with examples of how to use the LINQPad tool and how to implement inheritance with LINQ.

.NET - LINQ to SQL - part 1

An article about LINQ to SQL (Visual Studio 2008 bèta 2) with a lot of code examples using the Northwind database. Following topics are being covered : querying, view entities, view SQL statements, local data shaping, non-mapped properties in partial entity classes, object Relation Diagram versus Class Diagram, data shaping with non-mapped properties, change tracking, bulk operations.