Development Central

Several people at work are now using LINQPad. I’ve purchased the autocompletion (IntelliSense) feature, and find it well worth the money.

Derik Whittaker’s DimeCasts tutorials were helpful. I did find a few things they didn’t cover, though.

First, if your referenced assemblies need a custom configuration, you can create a LINQPad.config and copy it to the same folder as LINQPad.exe.

Second, select File/Save As to save a query to the My Queries folder. By default this is C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\LINQPad Queries (under Windows XP), but you can change that. The file is saved with a .linq extension, and is simply a text file with an XML-like header. The neat part is that references added with Advanced Query Properties are saved with it! This makes it very easy to create a library of snippets that reference your assemblies and contain any necessary setup code. You could even change the folder location and share it or place it under source control. LINQPad opens saved queries with a single click; these can be reconfigured and re-saved.

The IntelliSense works with referenced assemblies, too.

I set up our persistence framework in LINQPad today and loaded some business objects; it worked beautifully.

Highly recommended.