Thinq Linq

If your initial impressions of Linq are that it's mainly for data-access (because of the syntax similarities to SQL, and the availability of Linq to SQL), thinq again!

The Linq Cookbook (although in Visual Basic) demonstrates the sorts of problems you can now solve in a couple of lines of code:

• Change the font for all labels on a windows form


• Find all capitalized words in a phrase and sort by length (then alphabetically)


• Find all complex types in a given assembly


• Find all the prime numbers in a given range


• Concatenating the selected strings from a CheckedListBox

If you do want to read more about Linq and SQL/data access, Explore LINQ, SQLMetal and SqlTac courtesy of Red-Gate.

Linqaroo I

Playing with 101 LINQ samples and Searcharoo...

The simplest query (say, for the word "recent") over the existing 'index' looks like this

var x = from wf in catalog.WordFiles
        where wf.Text == "recent"
        select wf;

Digging deeper into the HashSet introduced in .NET 3.5, boolean search queries (which took ages to discuss & code in Searcharoo 2) can be easily described in Linq


so that a simple method call


will produce the these results (Console Apps - the easiest way to play with any new tech :)


Of course there's little indication of well it performs, or how it will work in the code itself (no query tree parser yet, so some work still to do)... maybe i4o - Indexed LINQ will come in handy, or at least provide some ideas for proper Searcharoo-backed Linq classes.

EDIT 30-Apr: It seems possible to play with the underlying structure of LINQ in .NET 2.0, although there's a bit more work to do exploring how robust the implementation is and how good the 3rd party (Hash)Set class is.