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As a .Net developer during my working hours I have come to love working with the latest bits including LINQ. I do not profess to be an expert at using LINQ however I am getting better at working with it all the time in part due to the use of LINQPad.  LINQPad is a great tool to help you build any type of queries with LINQ.  The purpose of this post is to get you to take a look at LINQPad and see if it might be of help to you.

I first found LINQPad when I was looking for more information on the C# in a Nutshell book, found the author’s website for the book and found LINQPad on the Extras page – that a tool existed just for working with LINQ was pretty awesome!

Let me add this is not a sales job here so when it comes time to talk about the upgrade you wont’ think I am pitching…

LINQPad can be found here.

Here is what LINQPad looks like (I linked to the Author’s site to ensure I get the latest snapshot):

LINQPad offers the ability to enter (in C# or VB) LINQ statements, LINQ Expressions as well as SQL statements (there are other options that I will cover in a later post in detail).  You can also connect to a SQL Server DB (Express or Compact Edition) and with a connection to your LINQ Data Contect component (if you have built one) you can perform queries right against your data with LINQ – that’s excellent!

I will also say that there are a ton of great examples on various uses of LINQ – more than enough to get up and running.

Besides the true value of LINQPad I really like the implementation in terms of updates – it’s pretty nice to load up your application and have it tell you that it HAS been updated and you need to restart with no fuss and no muss.

The free version of LINQPad is great but it can be much better with Autocompletion (actually essential!) which you can buy for a measly $19 so I did and it is worth it.  Here is the info on Autocompletion.

Finally, here is a great webcast with one of the author’s, Joseph Albahari, on the latest updates to LINQPad with respect to the Entity Framework.

So, I hope I at least got your interest going and if you use LINQPad and find it valuable consider spending a few dollars on the Autocompletion feature to keep this great tool moving forward but even if you don’t I think you will find good value with LINQPad.

Links to other LINQPad articles

LINQPad as a code snippet execution engine (Rick Strahl’s Blog)

Master LINQ with LINQPad (Info Q)

Want to learn how to use LINQ? Check out LINQPad (Dan Wahlin’s Blog)

All Articles on DZone for LINQPad

Up next…. File Managers!

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