In my previous post I talked about what is not supported in LINQ to Entities and made a simple comparison with LINQ to SQL show that these unsupported things works fine in LINQ to SQL.

Here I am going to provide workarounds these things. First one will be wrapping the entities with Business Classes. And the second way will be using client evaluation which is converting to work with LINQ to Object. Before you go further, I recommend that you read my previous post to save your time.

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Recently and after .Net 3.5 SP1 & Visual Studio.Net 2008 SP1 released, I started to play with LINQ to Entities. Really Entity Framework is interesting. Maybe not the best ORM tool, but still it is interesting and easy to use plus it is all one IDE at the end.

At the same time I was watching screen-casts made by Rob Conery about Building MVC Storefront along with TDD. In fact he was using LINQ to SQL. And I liked his coding techniques presented in his sample application and screen-casts.

I decided to play around with LINQ to Entities with MVC. Here I am going to talk about my adventures with LINQ to Entities, and really it is completely different from working with LINQ to SQL.

My recommendation for every developer is to start by reading Supported and Unsupported Methods (LINQ to Entities). Yes it will save you sometime. Do You know LINQ to SQL? Then you are familiar with LINQ. But you need to know what there and what is not there in LINQ to Entities. This even Might help you to build a wish list for LINQ to Entities also ;O).

Here I'm going to use some code samples presented in MVC Storefront and show some of the techniques that will not work with LINQ to Entities. And I will compare code with LINQ to SQL. In some other post, I'm going to present some other workarounds provided by ADO.NET Team when I asked them about the issues I have with LINQ to Entities. Also I'll present my own workarounds. And I'll compare the Generate SQL statements. I am not query optimizer, so I will not say what is the best choice. But you can help me in that.
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Well, I'm done with this article that show in details how to build on demand loaded details from master data using GridView and CollapsiblePanelExtender control. Read the article.

Earlier this year Matt Berseth posted about Building a Grouping Grid with the ASP.NET 3.5 LinqDataSource and ListView Controls. Then I followed his post with 2 other posts discussing same idea but with different implementation:

• Building a grouping Grid with GridView and ASP.NET AJAX toolkit CollapsiblePanel
• Building a grouping Grid with GridView and JQuery

Later I got few comments about how to implement that using AJAX, in order to display the details data on demand. At that time Dave was demonstrating the usage of jQuery AJAX on his post Using jQuery to consume ASP.NET JSON Web Services. So I came up with another demo to apply on demand loading of details data in my post GridView Grouping Master/Detail Drill Down using AJAX and jQuery.

Again I got few other comments on how to apply same approach, but using ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit CollapsiblePanelExtender control. So here I'm going to provide how to do that using CollapsiblePanelExtender and ASP.NET AJAX PageMethods call to apply on demand loading of details from the master data. You can read my article and view Demo here.

Comments can be left on this post as currently pages feature of BlogEngine.Net doesn't support comments.

I've seen different type of tooltips around. And actually jQuery tooltip plugin was one of the best I ever seen. And then I thought to build some tooltip similar to those tooltips available on asp.net learning items. Just simple one to be displayed on left or right of the tooltiped item (element). And I decide to build that using jQuery.ui widgets.

Very simple and straight forward, all I needed is the following:

• A tooltip fully UI customizable to be displayed to the right or left of the desired element. And it should detect if the desired element is closer to right or left on the screen; so the tooltip to be displayed correctly to the right or left of the element.
• Ability to control when the tooltip to be displayed, on hover or focus on the element or manually using tooltip widget methods such show and hide.
• Callback upon on show and hide of the tooltip.
• Optional fancy show/hide animations.

I built a sample which you can download to demonstrate how this tooltip should work and you can view the demo here.

Before go through the code, I recommend first to read the following posts:

• jQuery.UI ProgressBar Widget
• jQuery.UI Messenger\Outlook like message notification Widget

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