Tim Mackey's Weblog

here are a few of my main findings/hurdles encountered when upgrading May CTP web projects to Orcas beta 1 Web Application Projects.  I'm targeting version 3.5 of the framework for deployment on a Server 2003 with .Net 2.0 runtime installed, i will update this article if it doesn't work out. 

• if you had any code in the "App_Code" folder, VS will probably have set the compile action to "content", it should be changed to "compile".  otherwise you will get errors like: The type or namespace name 'xyz' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
• you'll have to remove any reference to the System.Query and System.Expressions, these are not part of the new LINQ spec.
• Replace System.Data.DLinq with System.Data.Linq.
• if you want to use any LINQ expressions, like "from x in db.Table select x" then you need to include the System.Linq namespace.  otherwise you will get errors like 'System.Data.Linq.Table<xyz>' does not contain a definition for 'Where' and no extension method 'Where' accepting a first argument of type 'System.Data.Linq.Table<xyz>' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
  
• you will also need to include System.Linq.Expressions if you are using "language-level code expressions to be represented as objects in the form of expression trees".

The old LINQ assemblies are versioned 1.0.2319.19044 (May CTP) but the new ones for Beta 1 are versioned 2.0.0.0.  Have a check through the referenced assemblies in your project to make sure you have the latest versions. 

Crystal reports

look out for the new crystal report assemblies, 10.5.3700.0.  a web app referencing the new versions in web.config will complain if these versions are not available on the server.  i'll update soon when i have found out how to do this.

I found this out today, if you want a stored procedure to handle optional values without limiting the result set when the parameter is NULL, you can use a CASE/WHEN statement to ignore the parameter in the where clause if it is null.  you just set ColumnX=ColumnX via the CASE statement, which will always be true, effectively resulting in (TRUE AND {remaining condition})

Procedure dbo.Select_Totals_For_Year
(
   @Name NvarChar(200),
   @Year int
)
AS
BEGIN
select Name, Count(ID) AS [Total]
FROM Table1
WHERE  Name = @Name AND
                 Year = (CASE WHEN @Year is null THEN Year ELSE @Year END)
group by Name
order by Name
END

not the most elegant solution you'll ever see, but i find it very useful when i don't want to store several columns for the different parts of a person's name in a database table.
it takes the surname based on the last space in the name.  so "Paddy Joe Gonzales" will be listed as "Gonzales, Paddy Joe".

Right(FullName, PatIndex('% %', Reverse(FullName))) + ', ' + Left(FullName, Len(FullName) - PatIndex('% %', Reverse(FullName)))    

not exactly rocket science, but i always forget this sort of thing. 

CONVERT(char(7), GetDate(), 121)

this gives a date like "2007-03".  it works because SQL formats the dates like YYYY-MM-DD etc., so you can just take the first X characters to take as much of the date as you want.

another handy one i use is to get DD/MM/YYYY format:

Convert(NVarChar(10), GetDate(), 103)

the full list of date styles is on msdn2