The Wayward WebLog

I love the IQueryable interface, but it’s got a dark checkered past that most of you might not know about. IQueryable is a great way to expose your API or domain model for querying or provide a specialized query processor that can be used directly by LINQ. It defines the pattern for you to gather-up a user’s query and present it to your processing engine as a single expression tree that you can either transform or interpret. It’s the way LINQ becomes ‘integrated’ for many LINQ to XXX products. Yet it was not supposed to be that way; with all that ease of use, plugging automatically into LINQ with an abundance of pre-written query operators at your disposal. You were not supposed to use it for your own ends. It was not meant for you at all. Read More...

LINQ to SQL, possibly Microsoft’s first OR/M to actually ship in ten years of trying, was never even supposed to exist. Read More...

I have been working a long time to bring queries into a modern programming language. Seven years ago I looked beyond ORM and saw the next horizon, a new world where boundaries between data are blurred and popular paradigms from different disciplines combine. Read More...

“LINQ is totally awesome. It’s like this thing that you use to condense your entire application into one line of demo code. Sweet!” - Stanley Morgan “LINQ is divine but DLINQ is a delinquent. It gives programmers too much power and makes programming against Read More...

I got a surprise in my inbox this morning. An email from Erik Meijer read: The impossible has happened: X# became Xen, Xen became Comega, and Comega has shipped. http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/default.aspx . Enjoy Matt Read More...

The X#/Xen (newly renamed c-omega) programming language has built in facilities to query data structures and databases. I had the pleasure to work on that project, implementing all the query features. The XML query features looked a bit like OPath from Read More...

I've been thinking of bits lately. You know, those fiendish critters that skitter around under the structures of our data. Take a peek. Look in the field and you'll see them; thirty-two in every integer. They are packed closely together, kind of like Read More...

I have been playing around with SQL lately, trying to get it to sit and roll over. Sure, I’m familiar with all the normal paradigms; all the usual crud. I can select with the best of them, slicing and dicing data with the efficiency of a ginsu knife. Read More...

It looks like X# might just see the light of day afterall, as the foundation of a even more ambitious research language from Microsoft. This article actually gets most of all the facts right. Except it doesn't mention my brilliance anywhere. X# == Xen Read More...