Taking my bitmap font Envy Code B into the vector TrueType Envy Code R was a long process, the most difficult being hinting.

Bitmap fonts are incredibly easy to make. Using a program like Softy or BitFonter you decide the size of your letters and start plotting pixels. You can see exactly how it will look because you draw every glyph (letter/symbol/number) in every size you want to support. This can obviously be very time consuming and doesn’t let you take full advantage of the resolution of the device and the capabilities it offers. A printer can handle in excess of 300 dpi while a display is typically 72 dpi (Mac) or 96 dpi (Windows) with LCD’s supporting sub-pixels due to the individual layout of the red-green and blue elements you can’t feasibly pre-plot every single combination and even if you could the file size would be rather large.

A few more useful and lesser-known tips for using LINQ to SQL.

There are times when LINQ to SQL refuses to cook up the TSQL you wanted either because it doesn’t support the feature or because it has a different idea of what makes an optimal query.

Being on the inside of a product team often leads to uncovering or stumbling upon lesser-known techniques, and here are a few little nuggets I found interesting — I have more if there is interest.

LINQ to SQL lets you specify that a property is delay-loaded, meaning that not retrieved as part of normal query operations against that entity. This is particularly useful for binary and large text fields such as a photo property on an employee object that is rarely used and would cause a large amount of memory to be consumed on the client, not to mention traffic between the SQL and application.

We’ve all heard of BDD, DDD and TDD but that still leaves 23 letters unaccounted for.

I can now exclusively reveal more! You may recognize some from projects you’ve already worked on but didn’t know had a name much less a recognized methodology.

An improved version is now available.

One of the things I wanted my LINQ to SQL T4 templates to do was be able to split the output into a file-per-entity. Existing solutions used either a separate set of templates with duplicate code or intrusive handling code throughout the template. Here’s my helper class to abstract the problem away from what is already complicated enough template code.

My templates that allow you to customize the LINQ to SQL code-generation process (normally performed by SQLMetal/LINQ to SQL classes designer) have been updated once again.

CodePlex makes it easier for people to be able to see and merge updates in with their own modified versions as well as report issues via the issue tracker etc. There is also an RSS feed that lets you keep track of releases, source updates or whatever else you are interested in.

A question I see from time-to-time on LINQ to SQL relates to changing an entity’s class.

C# and VB.NET don’t allow a class to change its type at run-time and LINQ to SQL specifically doesn’t provide a mechanism for changing the underlying discriminator for this reason.

One of the cool things about living in Seattle is the sheer number of passionate developers around. Whether you’re dropping into offices, heading across campus for lunch, meeting downtown for music and beer or, in my case, last month taking a Saturday out to participate in ALT.NET Seattle, there are ideas, enthusiasm and discussions with great developers to be had everywhere.

The ALT.NET event was interesting. If you didn’t already know the name encapsulates:

There has been a flurry of posts and comments in the last 24 hours over the future of LINQ to SQL so I thought it would be interesting to provide some information on what the LINQ to SQL team have been up to and what we’re working on for .NET Framework 4.0.

LINQ was a new feature in .NET 3.5 that provides a store-agnostic query language syntax using a provider model.

Like many other MacBook Pro owners I’ve been waiting for the October 14th event with some excitement. The highlights include:

But the downsides are also worth noting, all of which make me think when I replace my 2.6GHz 17″ MBP in a year Apple aren’t going to have something I want to replace it with.