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If you’ve used other flavors of SQL (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) and now you have switched over to TSQL (Microsoft SQL Server) you may have noticed that there is no native way of doing pagination. In some SQL versions, pagination was as easy as “SELECT * FROM ‘myTable’ LIMIT 0, 10″ and that would [...]
Many articles about SQL are spread too thin with “the basics” of a SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and a DELETE. By the time your done, you know a little about everything, and nothing useful. This article will focus on the meat of SQL, getting the data you want. We’ll start off with the simple, and move [...]
The previous article in the “Understanding SQL” series brought us from easy SELECT statements to more useful JOINs and subselects. This article will go into more advanced queries using Common Table Expressions (CTE) and aggregated results with the GROUP BY clause. The two don’t need to go hand in hand, but this article will utilize [...]
In the world of relational data, many-to-many relationships are one of the hardest concepts to understand and implement correctly. Quite likely the scenario will arise for a developer to decide whether to support a one-to-many or a many-to-many schema, and out of fear we crumble to an “easy” design. This article will use real world [...]
While the title of this article may seem misleading, you actually can achieve incredible performance gains by updating your web application to use LINQ. This article will dispell some common myths about LINQ and demonstrate how LINQ can practically increase performance. The examples in this article will be using LINQ to SQL, but the principles [...]
LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) is a powerful but misunderstood new language feature brought to us in the .NET framework version 3.5 (C# 3.0 and VB 9). Even though this is a new feature, it already has some huge misconceptions (such as thinking LINQ is a replacement to SQL). This article will teach you how to [...]
The GridView control in ASP.NET 2.0 is lacking some major (yet common) functionality – sorting. This article will show you how to create a “self-sorting” GridView using LINQ expression trees. First, it’s important to explain what I mean when I say that the GridView doesn’t have sorting capabilities. You’re probably saying to yourself – “I [...]
Microsoft’s Entity Framework is a new, powerful tool bringing data modeling, O/RM (object relational mapping) functionality and more. One expected feature of major ORMs is ‘Lazy Loading’. Learn how the Entity Framework provides this functionality in a different way. This article will explain the design reasons behind why EF is different than what you would [...]
The “Distinct” function in LINQ is definitely one of the top 10 most used functions, but it’s probably one of the top 10 most incomplete as well. This article will show how to extend the IEnumerable interface to allow a very easy way to specify what property makes your list unique (or ‘distinct’). If you [...]
Hot off the presses, and new to ASP.NET MVC (Preview 5) is an awesome capability that (in my opinion) revolutionizes the way we design web applications. This feature is being touted (by me) as “the ViewState for MVC”. First, the Challenge A common challenge of web applications is passing complex types and (more difficultly) stateful [...]