Zap + Me = LINQ

Well my blog has been neglected (more so than my wife) since I started my new job at Zap. So I thought I'd give a quick rundown of the company and how we go about the development life cycle.

Zap's core product is based on Business Intelligence (BI) meaning finding the real information in your (a business) data warehouse/s. Consultants will come to your business and analyse your processes and workflow, and design a cube in Sql Server 2005 Analysis Services. The Zap BI Suite 5.3 allows you to connect to that cube and create meaningful reports, charts, KPIs, Scorecards, etc from that data. Check out the website to learn more about our products.

In terms of development, we have a number of developers working on a single product in .Net. We use tools such as SVN, Cruise Control, FxCop, and Resharper to ensure continuous integration.

Moving towards the next version we are looking at .Net 3.5. Some of the technologies we will look at include Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Responsibilities for mastering these technologies has been divided out to the developers and I put my hand up for LINQ. This means I'll be able to build an extensive knowledge on LINQ which I can in turn share with you! In the short term (next post?) I plan to provide a comparison of performance between some of the key data binding technologies, such as LINQ, ORM products like nHibernate, object data source, table adapters, datasets, etc. I could compare the ease of use also but this is difficult to rate; I would think this would change per person and depend on their experience.

On the LINQ topic, Scott Guthrie just posted the 5th entry in his series about LINQ. Beta 2 of Orcas will have better support for LINQ it seems, and that should only be a few weeks away. I promise I'll post again before then!

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