Late night last night at the PADNUG meeting - which was, uhm interesting. I was speaking on - or supposed to be speaking on LINQ to SQL and Building a Business Layer. But as it turned out to a huge number of questions and various excited comments about basic LINQ syntax and the basic LINQ to SQL implementation I never even got close to the business object aspects.

Interesting - I've given a few presentations to user groups in my time but I think this is the most excited and engaged a group meeting as I can remember as people were maybe for the first time seeing the implications that LINQ as a language along with the support features of anonymous types, object initializers, extensions methods and a few others have on even basic application development tasks. I didn't plan to present on these features at all but changed course because of the many questions and perked up interest. 

LINQ to SQL also got a lot of interested comments and many, many questions but unfortunately we never got deep enough to look at the aspects I intended to get into on things that are really, really cool about LINQ and those that are uhm, a bit more difficult to work around with.

Overall this was a really fun ad hoc session - don't get to do that sort of spontaneous thing very often. Clearly there's a lot of positive and excited interest in this technology, more so than I had thought given that LINQ and LINQ to SQL's concepts have been floating around for nearly 4 years now.

I've posted slides, the sample application along with the business object wrapper framework I briefly showed at the end at:

www.west-wind.com/files/tools/pdxug_linq.zip

If you are interested on the Linq to SQL business wrapper there's a more complete post on this topic here. The code above has a number of updates from the code posted at the end of the original post, so make sure you download this zip file.

On my way home

The discussion went on some more after the meeting at Gustav's with a few beers and I got on the road back to Hood River around 11 and I almost got flushed off the road by torrential rain. I haven't seen rain this hard since Hawaii in a long while. It was raining so hard that going up a hill there was a solid 3-4 layer of water on the surface of the road with the car spraying water out on both sides. Add to that the ever fun I-84 tire ruts in the middle of the road that'd drop you another 5-6 inches and the bottom of the car felt like it was IN the water. Sheesh. It was a long  slow ride home. And this after I complained that Portland drivers seem to have no clue on how drive in the rain (I was stuck behind cars on the way out going 40mph on the freeway in a light drizzle for apparently no good reason several times). I did a little better than that but if there'd been other cars on the road I think 40mph might have actually been the right speed in the torrential rain conditions. Talk about eating my words.

Another funny story - I stopped by the Flying J to get gas and as I walked in there was some heated discussion going about paying for Reefer Fuel. I was pretty tired and drained by this time and I'm going Reefer fuel? Where did I go to here? Isn't that something out of Serenity? Or a Mad Max Movie? Apparently Reefer Fuel refers to some sort of discounted, tax subsidized fuel distribution, but I couldn't help laughing out loud and ask the attendendant, who didn't find it amusing in the least bit.  Reefer Fuel - where can I sign up for that? <g>