CLINQ v1.1 has been released. Some of you may have already downloaded some of the new builds, but here's a rundown of what the new release includes: Support for Continuous Aggregation. Now, in addition to being able to have your result sets automatically update themselves in response to changes in the source set as well as changes to items in the source set, you can have aggregate scalar values that continuously update in the same fashion. The following is a list of the supported aggregation types that can now be done continuously:

So you're building your data-driven application and you've got an ADO.NET Entity Model that represents an abstraction around your database. Maybe you're even pretty savvy and you've used inheritance and some filters to enhance the entity model so that it really is an entity model and not just a raw translation of your database schema into objects. One thing that I have noticed is that in a lot of sample code, a lot of utility functions end up being put in inefficient locations because people forget that the entity model is a partial class. This means that you can extend the model with your own properties and methods.

ADO.NET is the managed code library for the .NET Framework. Its ancestors include ODBC, DAO, RDO, ADO, and OleDB. Some of these technologies still exist in the framework, but most developers rely on the resources provided in the ADO.NET namespaces. There are evolutionary changes in ADO.NET 2.0 that will be released next year with Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and the .NET Framework 2.0.

In the early 1990s, I was working on a project in which we were creating an accounts receivable system. Because the users of the system would be dealing with people whose accounts were past due, the major concern of the client was that the windows open as quickly as possible. The ultimate goal was to have the main window in the application open in three seconds or less. We tried our best to optimize the application by removing unnecessary code from the window initialization code and optimized the database with appropriate indexes.

Object Role Modeling (ORM) is an excellent modeling methodology that you can use to construct a conceptual database model. This article is the second in a series of articles that introduce ORM.

Most developers have faced situations in which they need to read data from a file of some given format but can find no real library routines for this purpose, other than the standard file-handling libraries. In such cases, they would have to develop code to calculate the addresses of various values they want to retrieve from the file, plus write file-handling code to retrieve the data.

It is no secret that proper modeling when developing complex, multitiered applications is vital to the success of a project. Countless studies investigating the poor success rate of enterprise-level application projects point to a lack of adequate modeling and design techniques as a major contributor to the dismal failure rate.

More and more, enterprise users are moving into mobile work scenarios in which a network connection is not always possible and the traditional PC is too cumbersome. In order to reach such users, we as developers need to get our skills and systems up to speed with mobile development. .NET provides the tools and infrastructure to do just that with the addition of the .NET Compact Framework and Smart Device Extensions for Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Microsoft's development tools are justly famous for their ease of use, and many developers have had the pleasure of impressing their boss with an exciting application that they knocked together in an afternoon. Many developers have also faced the disappointment of finding that the techniques they've read about and used for the single-user prototype don't easily translate to a multitiered, multiuser application.

ADO.NET, the classes found in the System.Data namespace in Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET), provides a wealth of functionality to developers who need to manipulate data, which, as it turns out, includes most all VS.NET developers. One of its interesting characteristics is that you can use ADO.NET and rely on its defaults to quickly and easily get an application up and running. However, there are certainly times you need to get under the covers to configure the various objects in the System.Data namespace to handle custom scenarios. Nowhere is this more obvious than in how you retrieve data using ADO.NET.