Thursday, April 06, 2006

LINQ + WAP == Coolness

I never really missed Web Application Project support in VS05 until I realized what I could do with it. I've been experimenting with LINQ and wanted to be able to use it in a web application I'm prototyping. Under the file system model, there's no easy way to change the compiler used for dynamic compilation of web pages. With WAP, it's no problem.

If you've got both WAP and LINQ installed, you can enable LINQ support in your web apps by doing the folllowing.

1. Open your WebApp.csproj file in notepad.
2. Add references to System.Query, System.Data.DLinq and System.Xml.XLinq.
3. Change the Target Import element to import "$(ProgramFiles)\LINQ Preview\Misc\Linq.targets" instead of "$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets"

That's it! Seems simple, but it let me bind a GridView to the following function:

public static IEnumerable<Titles> GetTitles()
{
  var con = new SqlConnection(Properties.Settings.Default.PubsConString);
  var db = new Pubs(con);
  var q = from t in db.Titles select t;

  return q;
}

It would be even cooler if I could simply write that query in the conext of the ObjectDataSource, but of course ObjectDataSource doesn't know about LINQ. I imagine a LinqDataSource would be a logical next step.