LINQPad

on June 21 | in Reviews | by | with 1 Comment

Intuitive and pragmatic ORM-based databasing.

Summary:

Some Pre-review Info

First of all, let me start by saying with posting a link to the largest LINQPad logo I can find… it wasn’t easy to get at! Long story short, I pretty much had to load the entire LINQPad exe into a Frhed hex editor and export every PNG block, with a starting byte block of:

89 50 4e 47 0d 0a 1a 0a 00 00 00 0d 49 48 44 52

ending byte block of:

49 45 4e 44 ae 42 60 82

As most PNGs (if not all are encapsulated by the same bytes. I was yelled at in my earlier dev-days for not knowing hexidecimal because I never went to college for this stuff… well I learned hexadecimal in less than 24 hours so BLEHHH!

LINQPad Large Logo as promised:

(Click for Full-size)


While working with .NET isn’t always a joy, it is profoundly extensible and can be a joy when the correct tools are available.  Once such tool is LINQPad.

The story on how I fell in love with this tool is short but slightly humorous.  I first got it on a recommendation from my boss at time, thought it was a better way to write SQL, just to discover it had no intellisense which rendered the “better SQLing” useless to me.  Realize I was unaware of LINQ at this point and didn’t really understand what it entailed.  Bought and almost immediately got a refund of the software when it wasn’t what I was lead to believe… and SQL Management Studio alternative (later did I realize that’s exactly what it was, lol).

Roughly 3 months later I finally got around to picking up LINQ and said to myself “holy shit, LINQ is awesome! Maybe that LINQPad application was on to something!”.  Sure enough I downloaded and purchased the intellisense license again, lol.  And was AMAZED at what it could do.  I even wrote a small 5 line “program” that referenced 2 custom  type libraries and a few non-gac assemblies to read static files in a “repository” that no longer had a correlating record in a MSSQL table.  All possible with the Util.cmd() built-in function.  During the first week of my new job I wanted to test a theory with a XML-RPC web service I was working on, simply ran Visual Studio’s command-line “csc” exe on my assembly to turn it into a C# class library, imported it into the current tab, referenced it and intellisense picked it up and my prototype was successfully run.  Same can be done with WSDL web services with one additional step… granted I did all this before I RTFM (read the f**kin’ manual) and thought I was SOOO awesome, just to find out it was posted on the FAQ of the project site. DAMN IT!

This amazing program is a staple in my work day and would now be lost without it.

My rating for this application is an easy: [rating=5]

Keep up the good work!

about the author:

Anthony Steiner is a 27 year old Senior .NET programmer from Buffalo, NY, currently employed at a growing start-up out of Toledo, Ohio area. Anthony has nearly a decade worth the experience with .NET and the Windows platforms. Well-versed in both the web and windows-form aspects of the platform. Passions for development/programming stemming from working with PHP at a young age, he maintains a strong skill-set with PHP and has roughly 12 years of active experience. Anthony is also the co-owner and lead developer for a small web-technology firm known as Provisionists, LLC where gainfully employs today's newest web standards and technologies.

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  • Timur

    Thanks, I will try this tool as I am going to need some LINQ stuff for my project. Cheers.

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