More Orcas stuff

Just another quick post on Orcas, and in particular LINQ.

LINQ is obviously one of the buzzwords in .net at the moment, and I’ve been following it as the hype has been building…I have to say that to begin with my first thoughts were “well, it looks funky, but it’s never going to replace your standard ADO.Net SqlConnection, SqlCommand, etc method of data access”.

Now that I’ve looked into it a bit more, I’m prepared to admit that I’m wrong - it’s going to have a much bigger impact that I first thought. I’m going to be doing a lot of messing about with LINQ in particular to get a real good feel for how you use it, how it works, what you need to do to extend it, etc. That way, as an architect, I can be prepared to make a call as to how much use it will really be. My gut feel at this stage though is that LINQ could well be something that you’ll be wanting to use “everywhere”.

As I learn more about LINQ, I’m going to post my thoughts, but in the meantime, I want to pass on the source I’ve been using to learn about LINQ, in case anyone out there finds it useful. I’ve subscribed to Scott Guthrie’s blog, and he really is the man when it comes to getting concise overview information on LINQ. Scott seems to really have a talent for taking you to the right level of detail to be able to understand the subject at hand. Not too complicated, not too simple, his examples are really straightforward, and in my opinion, Scott’s blog is the best resource I’ve found yet for learning about LINQ, and other .net technologies as well. 

Playing with Orcas

So at work I was asked to participate in our Visual Studio “Orcas” technology adopter program…Of course I said “yes” even though I thought the chances were slight that I’d be able to actually use it in anger on a project.

But what do you know? The TAP program hasn’t even really kicked off yet, and I’ve been using Orcas beta 1 for real for a couple of weeks now already, thanks in part to the multi-targetting (so I can use it in place of VS 2005 for .net 2 and 3) and the fact that it’s compatible with TFS 2005.

 I’ve been using it from inside a Windows Vista virtual machine which I’ve dedicated 1GB of RAM for.  My thoughts so far? Well, I’m planning to blog on a bunch of Orcas features as I use them, and form concrete opinions on them, but generally I’ve been impressed. The big thing is that it’s rock solid. Compared to some other product beta’s that I’ve used, Orcas Beta 1 is as steady as a finished product. Granted I’ve not really been going hard out to break it or anything, but compared to experiences with VS2005 betas, and betas of Vista and Office 2007, where even the beta 2 and RC releases were buggy in some cases, this has been a dream to use. 

 So, overall I’d have to say I’m impressed so far, to the point where I’ve come up with a few ideas of some little side projects to tinker with using Orcas. I’ll blog on some of those as I go too, hopefully.