From the course: .NET Essentials: LINQ for Databases

Why this course uses LINQPad - .NET Tutorial

From the course: .NET Essentials: LINQ for Databases

Start my 1-month free trial

Why this course uses LINQPad

“

- [Instructor] For most videos, in this course, I'll use the LINQPad editor. Why use LINQPad? Don't we already have powerful programming tools from Microsoft? Yes, we do. Visual Studio is the IDE most dotnet programmers use to develop and test their applications. We will use it to examine the entity framework models used in the ports. I'm a longtime Visual Studio user. It's been my primary IDE for 20 years. And yet, I always install LINQPad on my developer computer. Let's see what it offers over Visual Studio. As the name suggests, LINQPad was created as a lightweight tool to write, test, and debug LINQ queries. Because LINQPad is easy to use, there's no need to build a throwaway Visual Studio project or clutter an existing project with experimental queries. Instead, use LINQPad to investigate LINQ and in purpose build application. That's useful for a training course. It lets us concentrate on the LINQ syntax and not the application infrastructure. In addition, it supports connections to databases and other sources. Once you connect and authenticate, you can run SQL and LINQ queries against the database. This means you don't have to mess with the SQL Management Studio or use Visual Studio data windows. It truly is quick and uncomplicated. Here's another plus. LINQPad is smart about how it outputs texts to the results window, whether from a query or a code snippet. Here's an example of a query result in LINQPad. By default, it's shown in a table layout with a subtotal row on the bottom and links to related data in the order and products column. We get this feature with every query. If we were running this query in a desktop web application, we'd need to write the UI, too. There's a lot to like about LINQPad. To get a better idea of what you can do with it, and to see all the features I'm using in this course, I suggest you watch our LINQPad Essential Training course.

Contents