Good evening everyone,
Since I started this blog I wrote a few posts about computer science and programming in particular, but I recently realized that I hardly ever discuss which tools I recommend.
The reason why I thought it was a waste of time is because most of the time, blogger will talk about a given tool because the editor contacted them and gave them a free license against a review. With proper disclosure of the arrangement and an objective point of view of the product, I don’t see any problem with that, but I though there was already enough material available online to discuss well-known tools.
However, I think some of them remain unknown and in some instances quite unfairly so. The tool I want to talk quickly about in this post is a perfect example: it’s call LINQPad.
First, I want to say that I did not have any contact with the editor, and that I bought my license (which enables more options, I’ll come back to this, but the main features are free). Hence, this “review” is totally objective.
LINQPad is a lightweight software which can be run as a single .exe (whithout any installation required except the .net framework). It has mainly two purposes:
- It is a C# and F# Scratchpad
- It helps browse and mine data sources easily
C# and F# Scratchpad
Basically, LINQPad allows you to write a snippet of code in C# or F# and to display some output without having to create and compile a Visual Studio project. This is really incredibly useful.
In a previous post, I discussed the advantages of functional programming. If you wanted to try my example, you would have to open Visual Studio, create a C# console project, write the code in the Main method, compile and see the result in the console. Using LINQPad as a scratchpad, I can simply copy and paste the code, use the Dump() built-in extension method for any object to display it as output and hit F5. I made a little screenshot of the screen’s important parts:
This example is fairly basic, but the cool thing is that you can access almost anything in the .Net framework and, if you need to, even reference some of your own DLLs or a even a Nuget package.
Data browsing and mining
Another power feature of LINQPad is its ability to allow you to “import” data source and interact with them easily. As a matter of fact, it comes with several built-in or third party providers which will help you through a simple wizard to configure the access to a given data source which you will then be able to query using LINQ. These data sources can be various: SQL, MySQL, RavenDB, Web Services and so on. Once the wizard is complete, you can access just as you would browse any type of collection which supports LINQ.
Again, you can write some scripts to retrieve some records, process them and display what you need. This is extremely useful if you have a database with a lot of data and you want to try different ways of displaying the information for example. It’s also very useful if you built some software but you didn’t have the time to write the administration part, you will still be able to extract the data and use it before you get the chance to create beautiful grid and everything -or before you actually give up because LINQPad might be enough if you don’t need to be over user-friendly.
That’s it, have a look at it, and buy it if you want to have some nice features like the intellisense and helpers of the sort. It really helps me a lot and avoids me creating a lot of useless visual studio projects.
Cheers,
Jeremie