October 2008 - Posts
Hopefully not but it certainly appears that way. I discovered this earlier today, can’t remember where I saw the first reference, and found a couple of great posts here and here. As someone who uses LINQ to SQL a lot with my personal projects this is very disappointing but it appears the writing is on the wall. As pointed out in this article about TDD with LINQ LINQ to SQL was always advertised in beta as being extensible so providers for other DBs could be created but it appears that this was removed in favor of SQL Server only at RTM.
I’ve always been a supporter of Microsoft but stuff like this is only going to add to the negative image they already have. The made something that was great and did its job well and at the last minute crippled it. Now LINQ to SQL has been moved to the same team in charge of the Entity Framework, which is definitely not finding favor with developers, which has left it for dead. Now the functionality that was originally in LINQ to SQL v1 (disabled not because of technical reasons, but political ones) is going to be included in to the Entity Framework which adds an overwhelming level of complexity that is not needed by the segment LINQ to SQL fits well.
If the ADO.NET team does kill off LINQ to SQL by ignoring it I definitely won’t be switching to Entity Framework unless they find a way to make it LINQ to SQL (quite an interesting thought huh). If you use or like LINQ to SQL let them know and just maybe they will listen.
I was recently in the need of a DataGrid for a WPF project and turned up this: http://www.codeplex.com/wpf. The WPF toolkit has, what appears to be, a WPF version of the Silverlight DataGrid (probably other differences). I haven’t gotten a change to really dig into the WPF toolkit but it certainly looks promising.
Yesterday I found out that there was a new firmware upgrade for my D-Link Router (DIR-655), something until now I had been happy with. When I got home from work I decided to upgrade, before it started the router warned me to backup the settings as the update may revert to default settings. That is fair enough, so I go ahead and backup the settings right away and then update.
Now I have plenty of experience with Netgear and Linksys routers and have never had a router update completely revert settings to factory defaults (including password). Sometimes there are sections that revert but generally things like passwords and IP reservations remain unchanged. This was unfortunately not the case, in fact the password was removed!
Fortunately I backed up the settings right? I mean D-Link told me that doing so would allow me to restore my settings if the upgrade wiped them out. Well sure enough it was unable to restore settings backed up by previous firmware. I find it very hard to believe that D-Link resets all settings and gives you no way of backing them up and restoring them. The real fun came up while I was trying to work from home this morning. Since I had setup a bunch of IP reservations I started having some serious trouble with conflicts and basically had to rebuild the network quickly this morning.
Long story short it was the worst firmware upgrade I have ever experienced with a router and it seriously turned me off to future D-Link products.
I was getting to the point where I was fairly sure I was ready to release an early beta but stumbled upon a deadlock so I’ll need to resolve this before I can get a release up.