Things I learned this weekend

Published to Blog on 2 Jun 2008

Wield Chkdsk sparingly

Do not set large hard drives (and especially not two large hard drives) to run an error check (chkdsk) on next reboot if:

your PC only supports USB keyboards and
your PC’s bios does not support “Legacy USB settings” and
you’ve never installed the Recovery Console to your PC.

You’ll have no way to cancel the chkdsk* and you’ll have to wait several (like 12+) hours for it to complete. No, regular Safe Mode doesn’t help, because it still tries to run chkdsk before booting the OS.

* - “no way” technically is not correct. If you had another OS installed then you may be able to boot into it and update the dirty flags on the hard drives so you could get around the chkdsk. Something like a Live CD from a Linux distribution might work. I’m sure there are other alternatives as well. “no way that the average PC user would consider easy” is probably the proper phrasing.

LINQ to SQL is gooood!

LINQ to SQL creates SQL just as good as I would write by hand, and most of the times better, and sometimes much better.
LINQPad = For The WIN !!!
To gain a better understanding of LINQ to SQL use LINQPad to see what the query syntax looks like as Lambda syntax and SQL Profiler (and/or LINQPad) to see the SQL being generated.
You can pass IQueryable around as many times as you want and the SQL is never executed until its turned into a list (think used as a datasource even if ToList() is not specifically called). I had a tough time wrapping my head around this one - SQL Profiler helped prove it to me.
The new ListView + the new DataPager + LINQ = beautiful music
Between LINQ to SQL, Subsonic, and Castle ActiveRecord I may never hand-code another line of SQL ever again.

Miscellaneous

The installation of VS 2008 to my workstation was nowhere near as difficult as I’d feared it to be. As far as I can tell it didn’t muck anything up.
GraphJam is hilarious
a Sunday afternoon nap is not a blessing, it is a right !

Dan Hounshell
Web geek, nerd, amateur maker. Likes: apis, node, motorcycles, sports, chickens, watches, food, Nashville, Savannah, Cincinnati and family.
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On 3 Jun 2008 "jayson knight"" said:
If I never had to write another line of SQL, I'd be a very happy man. Have you seen any memory issues running LINQ in loops? We're seeing some pretty serious problems which is really making us 2nd guess. Outside of loops, it's a no brainer...but we're baffled as to why we're seeing what we're seeing when running LINQ commands in loops.
On 3 Jun 2008 "Dan Hounshell"" said:
Jayson, my LINQ experience has been limited to about 8 hours of just learning some basics and using it for one small example. I had a site where I needed to add some paging to records being returned to a page and I knew LINQ, ListView, and DataPager had a good story for that. I just changed a couple of my Data Access methods to use LINQ to SQL rather than some hard-coded ADO.NET code and it worked fine. It is a small scale site (only about 10 unique users per day) and it is only used in a couple of places. I definitely don't have enough experience yet to comment on performance implications. But I love the developer story so far !!
On 4 Jun 2008 "James Curran"" said:
Another cool IQueryable<> trick While you are passing it around, you can modify it var q = from p in db.Person where p.State = "NJ"; if (age != 0) q = q.Where(p=> p.Age > age); if (salary !=0) q = q.Where(p=> p.Salary > salary); if (desc) q = q.OrderByDescending(p=>p.LastName); else q = q.OrderBy(p=>p.LastName);
On 4 Jun 2008 "Dan Hounshell"" said:
James, we're on the exact same page! That is exactly what I was doing with IQueryable. I had updated my data layer to return IQueryable rather than the DataTable it was returning previously. Then at a higher level I was modifying it by using Skip() and Take() to implement some paging and doing some different sorting in different places. My initial concern (because I hadn't worked with IQueryable or LINQ at all before) was that SQL queries were being made when the IQueryable was first created and passed and then again when I did the Skip and Take. SQL Profiler proved to me that it wasn't. And I learned the beauty of IQueryable!!
On 5 Jun 2008 "Chris Strolia-Davis"" said:
Hey Dan, LinqPad is great. Thanks for posting about it. I'd been meaning to learn more about Linq, and this is an excellent resource.
On 6 Jun 2008 "Dan Hounshell"" said:
Thanks, Chris. I took a look at LinqPad based on the recommendation of others. I have only played around with it for a couple of hours last weekend, but in that short time I found it invaluable, especially when just starting out with LINQ.
On 9 Jun 2008 "Justin Kohnen"" said:
I'm going to second Chris, thanks for posting about LINQpad. Now I can actually learn LINQ while still being stuck in .NET 2.0.
On 17 Jun 2008 "TrackBack"" said: