If you are interested in what LINQ to SQL generates and don’t have Orcas installed or available right now but use CodeSmith try the following template to generate very similar code.

The primary difference is that this writes out the System types rather than the C# aliases (e.g. System.Int32 instead of int) but that could easily be changed but is binary compatible and otherwise almost identical to the source.

A number of changes are happening within the Guernsey Developer Users Group!

We have changed the name to the Guernsey Software Developers Forum to better reflect the nature of the events and moved the Guernsey Software Developers Forum web site over to a new location, host and software.

An unusual bug in .NET Framework 3.5 beta 1 that relates to creating a new entity object in LINQ to SQL has been getting in my way.

When you create a new entity object it is not automatically added to the database unless you either attach it to the table or create an association to another existing entity.

Now that Sure and Wave/JT are operating in both islands competition is heating up unless you want 3G in Guernsey because the government awarded the licence to somebody who doesn’t operate whilst refusing a licence to the biggest operator. Way to go.

Wave/JT should be commended for offering the same plan and rates across the islands.

SourceGear, known for their Vault source control software, are giving away their three-way diff & merge tool DiffMerge for Windows, Mac and Unix.

DiffMerge has a clear interface and supports for file-type specific rule-sets that allow you to decide how to deal with white-space, line-endings, encoding etc.

Jeff Atwood asked What’s Wrong With Apple’s Font Rendering? and as I answered in the comments it comes down to philosophy:

The primary difference is that Microsoft try to align everything to whole pixels vertically and sub-pixels horizontally.

Whilst Apple’s Safari appearing on Windows isn’t all that surprising given the number of Windows-related patches to WebKit/KHTML they committed back the actual release has a few surprises.

Apple say the reason for Safari on Windows is to give users another slice of Apple pie. I think the real motive is likely to be that they want developers and designers on Windows to test with Safari and therefore improve compatibility for Mac users. Being that before this there wasn’t a single KHTML-based browser for Windows outside the Cygwin environment it’ll achieve just that.

I’ve been busy working on some LINQ to SQL (formerly DLINQ) apps that have been going well bar a NullReferenceException thrown at me from deep in the bowels of LINQ and it’s change tracker. A cursory glance in debug showed none of the properties that represent columns were null…

The null was actually a collection property that represented a one-to-many relationship that was automatically created using the foreign key constraints in the database. Normally this is set to an empty EntitySet however I was failing to call the default constructor from my new useful constructor.

Here’s the evolution of what should have been a clean reusable component in .NET and how it becomes a hack thanks to the limitation of the .NET framework.

I’m working on an application where I want two contextual menus on the notify icon. The right one will display a number of options for settings and creating new items and the left to switch between the various items.

Linux vendor Red Hat have released a font family named Liberation under a GPL license.

The family consists of three typefaces known as Liberation Serif, Liberation Sans and Liberation Mono each in normal, italic, bold and bold italic variants. The fonts are not hinted in this initial release so may not look too great on-screen at some sizes. Red Hat expect to release better-looking hinted versions in the future. Having attempted hinting Envy Code R font myself they have my sympathy.