Source Control Follow up

It’s been about 3 1/2 months since I made the switch to Source Gear Vault as my primary home source control. In the time that I’ve been using it it has performed superbly.  I recently did an upgrade, simple, quick and painless. All totaled it took probably ten minutes to upgrade the server using a single setup executable. Contrast that to the day it took a co-worker to upgrade subversion and the fact that he had to compile the  new server GUI functionality and it quickly becomes apparent that subversion is more of a road block than an asset.

A couple of weeks ago I ran across this Source Control How To by Eric Sink, one of the Source Gear Co-Founders. Even if you’re a source control expert it’s a good read.

LINQ to DataSets

There are tons of LINQ 2 SQL and LINQ to object examples out there but not many LINQ 2 DataSet examples. Here is a quick sample that creates a table, adds three rows and queries the rows.

The key parts of the query are casting the table as enumerable using the AsEnumerable() extension and the generic Field<T>() method.

 

   1: static void Main(string[] args)

   2:       {

   3:           // create a table with three columns

   4:           DataTable table = new DataTable();

   5:           table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("ID", typeof(System.Int32)));

   6:           table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("ContactName", typeof(System.String)));

   7:           table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("CompanyName", typeof(System.String)));

   8:  

   9:           // add three rows

  10:           DataRow row = table.NewRow();

  11:           row["ID"] = 1;

  12:           row["ContactName"] = "James Smith";

  13:           row["CompanyName"] = "Petes Hardware";

  14:           table.Rows.Add(row);

  15:  

  16:           DataRow row2 = table.NewRow();

  17:           row2["ID"] = 2;

  18:           row2["ContactName"] = "Jon Jones";

  19:           row2["CompanyName"] = "Rodgers Travel";

  20:           table.Rows.Add(row2);

  21:  

  22:           DataRow row3 = table.NewRow();

  23:           row3["ID"] = 3;

  24:           row3["ContactName"] = "Jeff Jones";

  25:           row3["CompanyName"] = "Rodgers Travel";

  26:           table.Rows.Add(row3);

  27:  

  28:           // create a data set, not needed but it's more common

  29:           DataSet dataSet = new DataSet();

  30:           // add the table

  31:           dataSet.Tables.Add(table);

  32:  

  33:           // get the jones brothers

  34:           var jones = (from r in dataSet.Tables[0].AsEnumerable()

  35:                        where r.Field<string>("ContactName").Contains("Jones")

  36:                        select r).ToList();

  37:  

  38:           // list the results

  39:           foreach (var item in jones)

  40:           {

  41:               Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Found {0} working for {1}",

  42:                   item.Field<string>("ContactName").ToString(),

  43:                   item.Field<string>("CompanyName").ToString()));

  44:           }

  45:  

  46:           Console.Read();

  47:       }

Podcasts

I recently purchased a new Zune, which I like very much. One of the things that I’ve found is that there are a number of great podcasts available on the Zune market place. I think all of them are free, at least I haven’t had to purchase. Here are a list of the programming or IT related ones I’ve liked and links to them on the web.

.Net Rocks (Carl Franklin)

Stackoverflow.com (Joel Splosky and Jeff Attwood)

Hanselminutes (Scott Hanselman)

Windows Weekly (Paul Thurrott)

These are all pretty good podcasts generally development or industry related. Check them out. If you have any programming related podcast favorites pass them along.