Is there an official forum to discuss LINQ? Is this the right place?

I've decided to dive in and play around with LINQ and I haven't been able to find much documentation as of yet and I'm coming up with several questions. I'm especially interested in using LINQ in BLL classes and what the best practices would be.

Thanks,
Tim

I use LINQ in one of my WPF applications.  I don't even need to make BLL objects as LINQ does this for me based on my tables.

What you do is add a LINQ to SQL file to your project.  Open a new connection to your database in the server explorer window.  Drag and drop your tables into the dbml file.  It will create all of your objects for each table with properties and proper types.  If you do your relationships in the database properly LINQ will even build the proper relationships in your objects.  For example, your Entries table has a foreign key pointing to the Accounts table's AccountID primary key.  you will see the relationships once you drop the 2 tables into the dbml visual designer.  LINQ also builds your databasecontext object so that you can instantiate the database and query it.  Make sure you are "using System.LINQ;" at the top of the cs file and you will be able to do anything in LINQ.

var q = from a in db.Accounts

          where a.AccountID = new Guid(AccountID)

          Select a;

q.Single().<any field shows here>

Or if you have a bunch of records returned:

foreach (var result in q)

{

       result.<any field shows here>

}

Hope this helps.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/tags/LINQ/default.aspx

Thanks.

I have an ASP.NET app. It currently uses a DAL and BLL. For practice, I'm trying to convert this to use LINQ for SQL. I understand that LINQ basically acts as the DAL, but now I'm trying to build the BLL. I build a class that has a function to return data. However, I am uncertain as to what datatype the function should be when returning the object. I want to be able to use the returned object as datasource for UI web controls (i.e. gridview) and also be able to iterate thru it like I could with a strongly typed data table.

Namespace MyApp

    Public Class Employee
        Public Function GetEmployees() As ?????
            Dim db As New MyAppDataContext
            Return From e In db.Employees _
                      Order By e.LastName, e.FirstName _
                      Select e
        End Function
    End Class

End Namespace

In looking thru various posts on MSDN, here, etc that declare the functions as IQueryable or IEnumerable. I'm not exactly sure which is best or even how to do it. Could someone post and example?

Thanks,
Tim

Hi:

  IQueryable inherits IEnumerable. So it's definitly ok to return IEnumerable. In your case though, since the returned type is actually IQueryable it's more suitable to return IQueryable instead of IEnumerable. Just assign the return value to var and retrieve data as normal.

Regards