We all know that today LINQ is the most popular and easy way for processing data in the .NET community. In fact you can use almost all data sources you might think of: plain objects, XML or relational databases.
While we have been offering an extensive LINQ support for months now, and we are continuously improving it, I don’t think it received the credit it deserves. So we decided to foster the awareness of our community towards the great LINQ support we provide with the Telerik OpenAccess ORM tool.
Ok, easier said than done. What approach should we take with this one? A demo is worth a thousand slides, so we decided to provide you with a sample application that demonstrates what level of LINQ support our product has achieved in the past few months:
We created a desktop Windows Forms application - not “dramatic” by any means - but it resembles closely the LINQ samples that are publically available from Microsoft®. And it clearly demonstrates lots of the LINQ features that Telerik OpenAccess ORM supports.
Let me say few words how the UI of the application is organized:
1. On the left-hand side of the form you will find a treeview that allows selection of the desired examples. This approach is widely used in our demo applications so no surprise there. When one selects a sample query to look at, some details appear on the right side of the form.
2. Description of what actually the example demonstrates.
3. In the code viewer window you can see the C# code for the executed query (we are still developing the Vb.net version of the sample application).
4. In the Output window you can actually see the SQL that we generate for the LINQ query used! Since there are many opinions on how the optimized SQL form should look like, please let me know what you think about the SQL query we generate. All feedback is appreciated!
5. Query Results – in the nice grid view provided by our colleagues from the Telerik WinForms team we render the actual data that comes as a result from the query. Cheers!
6. Last but not least is the “Execute” button that, when pressed, makes the whole thing spinning.
I hope you will have nice time playing with Telerik OpenAccess ORM and our LINQ support. Next time I will try to share with you how to use LinqPad with Telerik OpenAccess ORM.
And Yes, the UI is done using our fine Telerik WinForms controls, not WPF (being a bit nostalgic here).
The application is available for immediate download here. To use it you must have Telerik OpenAccess ORM installed.