I Love LINQ!

Posted by: Matthew on Wednesday, April 28, 2010

I started using LINQ about 8 months ago, before that I was strictly a stored procedure kind-of-guy. LINQ has made my programming life so much easier, no longer do I have to sit there writing SP’s for every database query I require.

These days my database creation steps look like this:

1. Create database in SQL Server Management Studio
2. Open the Server Explorer in Visual Studio and connect to my database
3. Add a LINQ to SQL Classes file to my project
4. Drag the database tables from the Server Explorer into the LINQ to SQL file
5. Create any associations / inheritance between tables (Right click on the table object, hover over the Add menu option)
6. Save my project

Once these steps have been finished and after I press the save button Visual Studio automatically creates all the classes required for database interaction.

Accessing the database and tables via LINQ is also super easy. Lets say we have a program that sells hotdogs to people. Here’s how I would add a hotdog sale to the database:

hotdogDBContext db = new hotdogDBContext();
sale newSale = new sale();

s.price = 2;
s.seller = "Frank"
s.date = DateTime.Now;

db.sale.InsertOnSubmit(newSale);
db.submitChanges();

Now lets say we want to grab all of Franks sales from the database:

hotdogDBContext db = new hotdogDBContext();

IEnumerable<sale> franksSales = from s in db.sales  
     where s.seller == "Frank" 
     select s;

IEnumerable<sale> franksSalesData = franksSales.ToList();

foreach(sale s in franksSalesData)
{
       Response.Write(s.Seller + " " + s.price + " " s.date);
}

Pretty simple isn’t it.

LINQ is just another great way for programmers to save time and make coding a little more enjoyable.