This week the guys talk to Damien Guard, a developer working on LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework. After discussing data access for a while, they talk about the programming font Damien publishes, Envy Code R.

  • Damien assures us that LINQ To SQL is not at all dead and talks about some of the new features in LINQ To SQL 4.
  • Damien discusses the T4 templates in EF/VS2010 as well as the LINQ to SQL T4 templates he’s released on CodePlex as L2ST4.
  • New features in EF 4 (LINQ operators, ObjectSet)
  • Additional LINQ To SQL mocking with ITable<T>
  • Some general discussion of query performance optimization in L2S and EF, including some enhancements in v4.
  • Code-only configuration to enable fluent configuration for EF
  • Kevin compares the code-only configuration to Fluent NHibernate
  • K Scott asks about how code-only configuration would enable TDD with EFF
  • Damien talks about the challenges of TDD and DDD when developing a framework
  • Jon asks the “Should L2S be on CodePlex” question
  • Damien mentions Matt Warren’s LINQ IQueryable Toolkit
  • Jon asks about the experience and improvements to migration from L2S to EF
  • K Scott asks about common L2S mistakes
  • Jon asks about POCO support in EF
  • Kevin bemoans the lack of support for refreshing a L2S model when your schema changes
  • The talk shifts over to the programming font Damien designed, Envy Code R
  • Damien explains the intricacies of TrueType, bitmap fonts and hinting
  • Discussion of font editing software, from FontLab ($500) to FontForge (free, open source), and Microsoft Visual TrueType (free, weird license agreement which must be faxed in)
  • Damien’s crazy font hack to get italic comments in Visual Studio
  • Jon asks about the new typography features in Windows 7, including the new DirectWrite API
  • Damien prefers Mac font rendering for quick glances, Windows for long use
  • Discussion of how fonts affect eyestrain
  • Jon talks about font rendering on Kindle and how he’s using it as an RSS aggregator

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Herding Code 50: Damien Guard on LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and Fontography

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