May LINQ CTP available now!

  • Article

A key part of what we do in Developer Division is to deliver tools and resources that help developers be highly productive. In that context, I am very excited to have the next LINQ (.NET Language Integrated Query) CTP available for you to download.

You may remember that at the last PDC in Los Angeles, we announced the .NET Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) project to take .NET developers to the next level of productivity. At that time, we talked about the challenges of building data-intensive applications. Today’s developers need both language flexibility and data source flexibility – they need languages that allow them to work with multiple data sources in sophisticated applications. Instead of adding a few APIs to incrementally improve programming with data here and there, we decided to change the game. Our goal with LINQ is to give developers the ability to transform and aggregate data from different domains while still working in familiar programming languages. Today’s CTP is a step towards making it easier to write data-intensive applications across a wide variety of data types.

Your feedback and excitement about LINQ helped drive the next stage of innovation on the LINQ project. This preview combines features that we had planned, features that you requested after trying out the PDC preview and some new ideas beyond the former two. All together, this preview sets the tone for the innovations in the next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework codenamed “Orcas”. It builds on key technologies in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 like generics and light-weight code generation that you can use today in our products.

The preview has a lot of interesting features for both VB and C# developers. In addition to navigating relationships between objects, you can now also do joins. Even in joins, we have gone beyond giving you flat results that you get in Structured Query Language (SQL). You can get hierarchical results like you would expect in the world of objects. More interestingly, there is new way for you to build your own pluggable query processor – through IQueryable<T>. The mechanism we used to build DLinq is now streamlined and available for you to build interesting new components that can be programmed using the LINQ pattern. Now what you can do is bounded only by your creativity.

We are glad that you tried our last preview and gave us frank feedback about things you loved and things you missed. That is exactly how our partnership should work. This CTP does contain inheritance support in DLinq, enhanced support for stored procedures, support for mapping files, a new designer to build mapped classes and LINQ over DataSet.

There are samples and documents and lots of goodies like visualizers and better VB IDE support for you to try out the preview more easily. So go ahead and take it for a spin and tell us what you think. We are excited to continue the two-way dialog and feedback as you try out all the new features that include productivity enhancements, support for a broader range of development scenarios and the ability to integrate LINQ with existing code.

 

Namaste!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2006
    We've been pretty quiet about the XLinq project and the XML features in Visual Basic 9 for awhile as...

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2006
    Look forward to trying it out

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2006
    Good question - in the kitchen of course!
    The dish is&amp;nbsp;now ready on the LINQ home page&amp;nbsp;and...

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2006
    Awesome!  I'm downloading now...

    Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2006
    When starting the installer, I get the message: "Cannot find a valid Product to install LINQ with" and then tells me that I need a version of Visual Studio 2005 installed in the next dialog.
    I do have Visual Studio 2005 Professional (German) installed and I never had such problems with other previews that involved VS 2005 (e.g. Orcas).
    I believe that the problem is related to the german language version of VS 2005 since there was also a language problem in the last preview (you had to copy some files after installation).
    Does anyone have a workarround for this?

    Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2006
    Finally next Linq CTP is available. As usual it can be downloaded from Linq Home Page&amp;nbsp;(here is Soma's...

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2006
    Yesterday Microsoft launched a mini-wave of data access related technology in a new way. Normally these...

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2006
    Hello Thomas,

    Thanks for trying out the preview. There is a similar question on the forum (not sure if you posted it or someone else) -
    http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=394174&SiteID=1

    Unfortunately as mentioned in the readme, we did not have time to test this on non-English locales. There is a workaround as posted on the forum entry above. Depending on how adventurous one wants to be, one could try that. But in general, supporting other locales is one of the goals of productization of the preview; i.e. in the future.

    Thanks again for trying out LINQ.

    Dinesh

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2006
    What ever happened to Object Spaces?

    Is LINQ intended to be used instead of an object/relational mapping framework like ObjectSpaces or nHibernate? Or could it be used with one of these frameworks?

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2006
    Chris,

    We did not really have the resources/time to test the preview on non-English locales. That is one of the tasks we do for productizing previews.  So I am reluctant to suggest untested workarounds.

    You may want to use the LINQ forum for more information and experience of LINQ users on non-English locales.
    http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=123&SiteID=1

    Thanks.
    Dinesh

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2006
    LINQ Description:
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/ref/linq/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/linqprojectovw.asp...

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2006
    “The LINQ Project is a codename for a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated...

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2006
    Wellcome to the real world.

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2006
    The comment has been removed

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    March 19, 2007
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    June 09, 2009
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