[)amien

Thanks!

Adding such a feature would be of limited use as you would’t be able to query on it. You could achieve by mapping the decimal as private then adding your own hand-written public MyMoney property that lazily-creates based on the private decimal and likewise updates it on set.

[)amien

eg for …

public class POCO { public Money MyMoney {get; set;} }

can we attach a delegate on-type-map that says, if source type is decimal/double and target type is Money do … assign new Money(value)?

Otherwise does L2S have a simple globally factored way to achieve this?

That will really help.

Hi,
The L2ST4 templates you’ve developed are really nice and useful.
They work well against the dbml generated through VS.
When running against a file generated with SQLMetal I get the following exception:

System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: objectToConvert
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplating.ToStringHelper.ToStringWithCulture(Object objectToConvert)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextTemplatingE49A33EA5AEBE14AAF17271D723B1779.GeneratedTextTransformation.TransformText()

Can you please have a look?
Thanks,
Luc

Can you please answer the question regarding new SQL datatypes? Are they going to be supported in L2S at par with EF?

Is the SQLServer provider used in LINQ the same with the one in EF?
Thanks again

LINQ to SQL will never get other databases – 85% of the codebase is the SQL Server provider.

[)amien

Reliable, complex systems are build with simple concepts.
Yes, we have started with EF(due to concerns surrounding L2S) and yes we wasted two development months.

To me, as the name says, Linq2SQL gives the data layer of the application:
– a one to one table to object mapping with translation between SQL and .Net types
– and a reliable way to perform CRUD operations on the database.

The problems arise when people try to use it as an object repository. This looks good only in demos.
In real life, for any complex system you need to take control of your domain objects. To avoid things like “sorry, can’t have the context to query from within your objects because it’s not good for you”.

@ 5×1llz – and other people who think EF is the answer for large systems – On the contrary, L2S could be used to build the data layer of domains as complex as you can imagine. Of course, you have to build your own domain framework, which is not hard considering L2S can do the heavy-lifting regarding the DB access.

At the other end, EF gives you a complicated, prepacked domain template that is not extensible – just try it out. EF gives you the illusion it can solve your domain but as you want to add abstractions into the framework more and more workarounds are needed to the point that a mess emerges.
From what I have experienced so far EF is:
– too complex for simple systems
– impossible to extend for complex systems (I am referring to extending the framework to incorporate your own abstractions and conventions).

This leaves EF for systems in the range of up to 50-100 tables, but don’t get your hopes to high if you want to implement an elegant solution. Of course one can build a 200 tables system with EF (let’s assume it, although I’m not sure about that as I ran in significant performance problems when approaching 100 tables; even following the MS recommendation to pre-compile the model views, moved the inefficiency from the start time to compile time – not to mention that that one table with over 70 fields had to be split to reduce the views compilation from 2.5 min to 40 sec).
Just that it’s not worth the pain and effort. You will spent far less time implementing your own domain as opposed to searching for workarounds that give you half baked solutions.

The reality is that complex systems are architected with specific conventions built into the domain, otherwise a 200 tables+ system becomes needlessly hard to manage. From start, EF emphasizes configurations over conventions and comes up with huge XML configuration files, very hard to maintain (csdl, msl, ssdl). If you think that the designer takes care care of it and you don’t have to open/modify them – good luck with that.

IMO, EF continues the MS tradition of producing yet another data access library.
As a matter of fact, I’ve read articles advising to use EF as a DAL! What?

It is said that EF v2 will be better. I’m sure it will be improved considering the teamis more open to the comunity. But I am skeptical about being significantly improved as the starting point is very discouraging.

All I know is what I tried: L2S v1 – usable; EF – v1 unusable. Kind of tired of smoke and mirrors.

@ Damien – It seems to me that a large number of folks out there (including MS folks) hope that the L2S library lives up to its name and the really important sections will continue to be addressed:
– Query stability and performance – I see you guys made progress – Thank you !
– SQL to .Net data types translation – would you not consider this a core feature and add the new SQL types?
– Is it possible that sometime in the future other databases will be considered?

Thanks,
Luc

You could likely achieve what you want with templated code generation, check out L2ST4.

[)amien

I just hope that this is finally intergrated:
http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=963657&kbln=en-us

It never made it into the 3.5 framework, and its been a known problem for a long time. The hot fix fixed the problem. Its been available for years now.

It is possible to hide intermediate tables yourself – PLINQO does it through templates and could probably modify the L2ST4 templates to achieve a similar result.

With response to the other questions about SqlCache, full-text indexes, spacial support etc. – if it’s not on this list then you can assume it’s won’t be part of .NET 4.0.

[)amien

In some ways it is actually superior to EF due to its simplicity; if you give people simple tools they will figure out how to solve complex problems in ways you haven’t imagined. (We are building inheritance support on top of Linq2Sql by modifying expression trees).