Emerging .NET Devs – Oct UG Meeting on LINQ

Contributed by Adil Mughal

We had a fantastic show at User Group, UG meeting on 17th October ‘09, on “Practical LINQ”, organized by Emerging .NET Devs at Microsoft Innovation Center. We would like to thank every individual who participated and made the event successful. We would also thank our speakers Adil Mughal (MVP) and Munir Usman (MVP) for playing the most important role in this respect.

The main idea behind arranging an event on LINQ was the realization that LINQ is still under utilized in the Software Development Industry specially in the Pakistan.

Following was the agenda of the discussion:

• Challenges before LINQ

• Introduction to LINQ

• Pre-requisite to LINQ (C# 3.0 Features)

• LINQ to Objects

• Refreshment

• LINQ to SQL

• LINQ to XML

The discussion was started by Munir with the challenges and problems faced by programmers without LINQ. Three major examples were discussed with the audience and they were encouraged to give response on them.

First example was related to issues in accessing data from Database using ADO.NET and the transforming of relational data to objects. Second example was related to the issues in accessing XML followed by issues in sorting, filtering and ordering objects/collections in memory.

The discussion was then continued by Adil, introducing LINQ and C# 3.0 Features such as Automatic properties, Implicitly defined local variables, Object Initializers, anonymous types, lambda expressions, extension methods etc.

The speakers introduced the LINQ syntax, demonstrating LINQ to Objects,initially from simple queries and moving towards complex queries along with the comparison of performing similar task with and without LINQ in order to get through understanding of how LINQ enhances productivity and provides an ease to programmers.

The audience was very keen to ask questions related to LINQ queries and we must say that this was the most interactive audience of our User Group Meetings. Moving forward, Munir continued the discussion on LINQ to SQL and talked about Data Context class, which is automatically generated by Visual Studio. Munir demonstrated the use of LINQ to SQL using famous NorthWind Database.

Finally, we moved towards LINQ to XML and speakers demonstrated how easy it’s to generate XML from data and retrieve data from XML.

The sample code and presentation will be soon uploaded on the Speakers’ blog/website. Once again, thank you all for taking out time. In the last we would like to thank people at Microsoft Innovation Center for helping us out in organizing such event, specially Noman Sohail. We look forward to see you all in the upcoming events. Our next event is on Windows 7, so stay tuned!

Those who attended the show, please take out few minutes to provide us feedback here.

About Emerging .NET Devs:

Emerging .NET Devs is a registered user group under International .NET Association (INETA). The group is committed to a vision of disseminating information through lectures in events, sessions and to enable the developer community to collaborate with each other.

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About Author:

Adil Mughal is working as Development Executive at Telenor Pakistan. He is Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and also Microsoft Certified Professional. He is leading International .NET Association (INETA) user groups, “Emerging .NET Devs” and “DevNext”. He is also author of few articles at CodeProject.com. Being active community contributor, he often participates as speaker in different events. He frequently does blogging at http://www.AdilMughal.com