Anyone who is familiar with C# and .NET will surely know
what LINQ is. But not many developers are aware of LinqPad. LinqPad is a cool,
useful and highly powerful tool to write and execute LINQ queries. It was
developed by Jospeh Albahari. Joseph and Ben Albahari are the famous brothers
who wrote the C# in a Nutshell and other popular C# books for Oreilly. They are
well-experienced in enterprise development with .NET
Linqpad allows you to query against various data sources
including collections, arrays, SQL Server and Oracle databases. It also
includes tonnes of sample examples, a sample database and over 200 examples
from the book "C# 4.0 in a Nutshell".
If you are a .NET developer and use LINQ frequently, then
this tool would be really handy for you. I found it very useful when trying to
solve problems that involved query operators and query expressions. Just
looking at the sample examples helped me learn a lot.
Take for instance this query included in LinqPad:
var names = new[] { "Tom", "Dick",
"Harry", "Mary", "Jay" }.AsQueryable();
var query =
from
n in names
where
n.Length > 3
let
u = n.ToUpper()
where
u.EndsWith ("Y")
select
u;
query.Dump();
It does not even use a database! It illustrates the use of
multiple WHERE clauses. The output is
HARRY
MARY
Consider this sample query included in LinqPad:
var names = new[] { "Tom",
"Dick", "Harry", "Mary", "Jay"
}.AsQueryable();
(
from
n in names
let
vowelless = n.Replace ("a", "").Replace ("e",
"").Replace ("i", "").Replace ("o",
"").Replace ("u", "")
where
vowelless.Length > 2
orderby
vowelless
select
n // Thanks to let, n is still in scope.
)
.Dump();
It demonstrates use of "let". The output is
Dick
Harry
Mary
Many more such
examples are included in LinqPad. You can view the sample query and right away
execute it by clicking the Execute button.
![linq.jpg]()
LinqPad is available for free download at:
http://www.linqpad.net/