3/5ths of the EDMUG crew (Rockarts, IglooCoder, and myself) along with the ever tenacious Tech Embassy are down in Calgary for yet another wacky semi-orgasmic adventure.  Don is not the only guy who gets to show off when he goes to conferences, baby!  For those of the non-technical who come visit this blog, consider this a look at how the other half lives...the *sexy* half!

LINQ (Daniel Carbajal)
- A Sony Vaio laptop breaks the streak of ridiculous "pimp my laptop" setups I've seen in the last several presentations.  Although I think Darcy's "hold my dongle" laptop would be a good candidate for an actual episode of that show...
- I can tell Daniel is excited since he is constantly using a closed fist when speaking!!  And even at times...the *double* closed fist~!!!
- LINQ is an interesting hybrid of standard SQL operations and actual .NET code.  I like it a lot simply because I think it brings two distinct worlds closer together. (expand on opinion in later post)
- Queries are executed in foreach statements if directly thrown in vs. if the query goes through a data type change prior to the foreach.
- No real data definition for the query except for "var"?
- Grouping of values by a particular key is interesting.
- These chairs are seriously going to wreck my back by the end of the day!!
- LINQ examples:  "Anders had to pay $500 to get these examples"  - *huh*??
- Showing LINQ examples - this is definitely powerful stuff; it's a shame I have to wait until 2007 to use in a prod environment...
- This shirt looks awesome on me - it's a shame you all have to miss it.  It's almost burning up the room!
- Comparison between data access today and with LINQ - queries and query syntax used to access data is actually checked at compile time.  Collections *and* results are strongly-typed.
- application uses a linq query, recieved by ADO.NET which generates a SQL query for the results.
- EVERYTHING YOU KNOW WILL CHANGE! (according to Dan)
- The loaded question - will this work with Oracle?  Yes - every database that has ADO.NET provider support with work with it.
- No, I mean it - I will be lucky if I'm not in a wheelchair by the end of the day!  
- DLINQ will automatically manage change tracking for stored procs, etc.
- DLINQ relationship designer reminds me a lot of Biztalk's designers
- comment from the audience - very reminiscent of NHibernate; JP saves the day with, "They're trying to emulate it for certain, but the query interface is nicer"
- Lot of attribute usage in the mapping of code to db objects
- Impressive - in the debugger, the actual compiled SQL expression (that will be sent to SQL) is visible.
- The VB support in this seems to be the first instance I've seen where VB is well ahead of C# in terms of its support levels.  Inline XML and query definitions.
- Hammering.  Where is the hammering coming from?
- Daniel mistypes "WriteLine" as "WriteLie" and all of a sudden I have genius-level ideas going through my head.
- PLEASE STOP THE HAMMERING ARRRGH THE VOICES
- Holy cow.  XLinq is *way* easier than simply using the System.Xml library and rolling through the DOM.  Has the power of XPath/XQuery without the need to tinker in those APIs.  I think the example of creating a single XML element is a little bit too simplistic for this crowd though! =) 
- "Do you have any questions" followed by the sound of shattering glass.  Good effect!!
- THE VOICES ARE ANNNNGRRY

Mu summary of this presentation in poetry:

My shirt is hot
these chairs are not.  
But XLINQ I definitely like a lot.

Fin