Me and Amr Elsehemy are working together in something and he requested a feature in some APIs I built. In fact he liked the Rob Conery's PagedList that had been modified by Troy Goode. He used it on his jBlogMVC post series about building Blog Engine using MVC.

That was pretty simple and I noticed something missing on the PagedList that I wished to add! What about sorting. I mean build a PagedList that is sorted. So I made slight changes to the enhanced PagedList made by Troy to support sorting.

Prerequisites:

It is required that you refer to Rob Conery's PagedList and the modified version by Troy Goode before you proceed in order to understand how this PagedList is useful and helpful with MVC and LINQ to SQL as well as LINQ to Entities.

Summary of changes:

To summarize the changes I made, simply I used Lambda Expressions to enable sorting. And had to modify Class declaration (with constructors) and the Initialize method. Sorting is provided by OrderBy extension method. Please return to method documentation for more details.

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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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