Check Out Visual Studio Tips and Tricks

Scott Cate has started a Video Blog showing Visual Studio Tips and Tricks. Starting with Tip of the Day posts originally done by Sara Ford over 2007 and 2008, the Video blog is a great way to see Visual Studio in action.

Scott already has the first 20 tricks posted.

The site is also mobile enabled for Windows Mobile, and if you browse the site from your phone, you'll see a nice mobile layout, as well as a mobile version of the video trick.

Check out the Scott's blog and subscribe to the RSS feed if you like what you see.

Blog: http://ScottCate.com/VSTricks

RSS: http://feeds.ScottCate.com/VSTricks

VSTS Development Edition + Database Edition

This morning we made the official announcement (general info and press release) of the next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. This includes Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio Team System 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

In the next release of Visual Studio Team System we will be merging the feature sets of the Development Edition and the Database Edition into a single product. The new product – part of Visual Studio Team System 2010 – will include all of the features in the Development Edition and the Database Edition as well as new capabilities delivering even more value in a single product. This will provide a more complete set of capabilities for building software in today’s data-driven environments.

Bringing these two feature sets together enables you to take advantage of the core tools for application development as well as the necessary tools for database development, including performance profiling, code analysis, code metrics, code coverage, database refactoring, Schema Compare, Data Compare, and more.

If you have VSTS 2008 Development Edition or Database Edition with MSDN Premium you are eligible to get both products through MSDN Downloads. This is an exclusive offer for MSDN Premium subscribers with these products -- we want you to realize the benefit of this merged feature set now.

Beginning October 1, 2008 eligible MSDN subscribers will have access to both the Development Edition and Database Edition through MSDN Subscriber Downloads. This change also applies to customers who purchased Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers with MSDN Premium Subscription and Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals with MSDN Premium Subscription, who's subscription is still active.

A Little on LINQ

Recently I was involved (only a little) in preparing some of the Visual Studio Launch content for the February 27th launch event (and subsequent worldwide events). During the preparation we held "train-the-trainer" meetings where people who would be presenting launch sessions around the world could learn more about the sessions and ask questions. During one of these TTT events a question was raised about a LINQ demo that was written for a session named "Breakthrough Software Development Challenges with Visual Studio 2008".

The Question

Is there a performance impact to joining result sets in LINQ from two different data sources?

This question came up because this is exactly one of the scenarios we demo. Here is my rendition of the demo.

The Answer

I talked to the language teams and this is the truth of the situation.

For cross-domain joins you typically have the choice between really lousy performance or a runtime error – and generally you should prefer the latter!

The original source of the query gets to decide how the query gets executed. If the source is a LINQ to SQL table, for instance, it will simply look at anything it gets joined with, and throw an error if that is not another LINQ to SQL table, entity collection or query result.

If you go the other way, however, and join an in-memory collection (such as the descendents of an XElement, as in our demo) with a LINQ to SQL table or query result, then you are in trouble: It will enumerate the table into memory and do the join on your machine (Yikes!).

The general guidance is: don’t do cross domain joins!

Let me qualify a bit: I am talking specifically about a “Join” operation on large data sources in different domains. There are several things you can still do to work sensibly across domains, such as:

• Query the remote (e.g. LINQ to SQL) data first to yield a small enough result that it makes sense to pull it down and join locally
• Use the Contains() method on LINQ to SQL data, which will take small local collections and actually send them to the db as an IN expression in the generated query

The upshot is that one still has to be aware of the cross-domain joining and manage its impact as an application programmer.

D7