The Screening Room #5: LINQ

The May episode of The Screening Room is a continuation of my earlier podcast with Anders Hejlsberg. The podcast is the conversational part of our recent get-together to discuss the new preview of LINQ, and this screencast is the demo part. Topics covered in the screencast include the new join syntax, the DLINQ visual mapper, adaptation of stored procedures and user-defined functions to LINQ,an experimental approach to transforming XML into modifiable .NET code, and dynamic construction of expression trees.

At 50 minutes this screencast runs a lot longer than the earlier episodes in the series, which are all about 20 minutes long. That's partly because I'm very interested in LINQ, and when you can get Anders Hejlsberg to give a personal walkthrough of this evolving technology, it's worth sharing in toto. But it's also because I'm rethinking my approach to this series. My most popular screencasts have all been in the 5-to-8-minute range, and I felt that 20-minute episodes would really be a stretch. The fact that none of them have attracted a huge amount of interest might suggest that they are, indeed, too long. Or it may simply indicate that the audience for these in-depth shows is smaller, which isn't surprising. Might that smaller audience, though, want to see more rather than less? To test that theory I'm running this episode long.

I should also mention that at this site you can see the two presentations that I originally saw at the PDC last fall: Anders' introduction to LINQ, and his explication of how C# 3.0 supports it. So far as I can tell they will only play in MSIE on Windows, and if so that's a shame because LINQ has provoked a broader conversation, and it would be useful for everyone to be able to see those presentations. Maybe this platform-neutral screencast will be helpful in that regard.

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/05/31.html#a1458