Hello, I'm   Jason

I’ve recently discovered that LINQ and VB can be confusing. I was attempting to pull the top 10 rows of a table where the column started with ‘W’. You’d think after I typed that, I’d figure out the solution. That’s not the case. Instead, I struggled. Here’s what I originally came up with:

I was looking to separate my LINQ to SQL data layer from the rest of my application. So, I decided to move the files to a class library. This way, when my application builds, all of my LINQ files are found in MyApp.DL or something similar. However, I wanted the class library to use the SQL connection that I have set in my web.config. Because the class library does not have a reference to System.Configuration, I had to add that first. I then created a partial class for my Context object. Inside, I created a new constructor with a boolean parameter called UseWebConfigConnectionString. My web.config would contain a generic connection string name called LinqSqlConnectionString. This allows me to make changes to the LINQ files, save them, and not affect this method. So, here’s what I ended up with:

It’s actually pretty easy and user friendly to obtain the value of the identity column using LINQ. After you create your object and insert it on submit, you can call the identity column’s property on your object. For instance:

According to Gizmodo, the iPhone 3G launch date will be June 9th. It will be interesting to see what further market share the iPhone will capture with this latest phone. I know many individuals have held out from purchasing an iPhone because of the lack of 3G support. It will also be interesting to see what phones other providers will release to compete with the iPhone. For more details, visit http://tinyurl.com/5pe7pc.

The second Philly.net Code Camp will be held tomorrow. Roughly 600 attendees will get to see some great talks in 8 different tracks. For more information about the event, check out http://tinyurl.com/5t7qdw.

I just read an interesting article where Cemaphore is creating an add-on application for Google Apps. It’s an interesting concept. I haven’t messed with the Office Online options yet to see if the Microsoft team has something similar. If they don’t, this sure would help Google. Here’s the full post http://tinyurl.com/4lpht8.

Soma just posted that SP1 for VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 is available. The full blog post on his site is at http://snurl.com/28i1z.

I’m moving my sports blog from MSN Live Spaces over to ESPN. Hopefully ESPN will release an RSS aggregate for the blog posts, but for now, you can add me to your fan profile here: http://sportsnation.espn.go.com/spaceman126/.

I just came across a post that the FBI purchased 3500 counterfeit CISCO parts (estimated at $3.5 million in value). This goes under my “funny, but not funny” category of the day. 🙂 Here’s the full article: http://tinyurl.com/5aht29.

You can now download an add-on for Microsoft Word that supports DAISY XML, the Digital Accessible Information System standard for accessible translation. The add-on reads the word document to individuals. Like most accessibility projects, there are still some bugs that need to be worked out. If you’re interested in testing the add-on, please visit http://tinyurl.com/5txl7a.