ASP.Net 3.5 - Scott Guthrie is the man!

If you are a .Net programmer and you have not checked out the Microsoft ASP.Net 3.5 platform you are really handicapping yourself as a programmer. There are so many enhancements to the 3.5 platform that make programming in .Net something to enjoy more than you ever have in the past. Any .Net programmer should be subscribing to Scott Guthrie's blog as he explains some of the best kept secrets in the .Net world.

One of the newest additions to the 3.5 framework that makes my life as a ASP.Net developer enjoyable is the LINQ (language integrated query). LINQ allows you to write a simple query to pull data from the database, xml file, or other LINQ source. The query is based on a dbml file that models the datasource showing relations between the different tables you may have. You can then specify an object of one table and get it's children from another table using LINQ notation. LINQ does all the inner join statements necessary to pull that data back out for you. This is a great tutorial on LINQ to SQL.

My second favorite nugget of goodness with the 3.5 framework is the ability to extend CLR datatypes without having to sub-class the type. If you create your own static class you can just use the "this" keyword in the declaration of an object extend the methods applied to that object. Scott Guthrie again teaches us how to use that in his article here.

As I review this post I have realized that instead of reading this you should be reading Scott Guthrie's blog. So go! Read it! He has written some very cool stuff that will help you become a better ASP.Net developer.