the flying squirrel

Linqpad is a great little tool that one of the guys at Miovision introduced me to.

Linqpad does three things, each of which is kind of useful. Put them together and you have a colossally useful tool.

1. It lets you browse data, query databases, xml, etc.
2. It's a great tutorial for LINQ, which is tremendously powerful, but not terribly intuitive.
3. It's a fully featured .NET code snippet interpreter.

I'd often find myself in the SQL Management Console testing out SELECT statements that I'd then turn into LINQ queries. Linqpad lets me skip the translation step.

Plus, it comes with tonnes of code samples from the O'Reilly C# 3.0 in a Nutshell book, which you can look at and play around with to figure out how to do whatever strange join you're trying to do.

Finally, if you've used Python or Ruby for any length of time, you come to see how useful it is to have that interpreter there to just try things out without a lot of overhead.

Very handy. If you're working in C# on Windows at all, give it a try.