This is a guest post written by John Daniel-Trask from Mindscape.

Mindscape have released a major upgrade to their LightSpeed domain modelling / ORM tool. Version 2.0 includes a visual model designer integrated into Visual Studio, LINQ support, and the ability to access multiple databases concurrently. LightSpeed is a small, fast domain modeling tool which uses convention over configuration to perform object-relational mapping without the need for complex mapping files.

In the past it’s been necessary to code LightSpeed models explicitly in C# or Visual Basic, but the new Visual Studio-hosted designer enables a more data-centric approach: developers can drag tables from Server Explorer and LightSpeed automatically creates the models for them. Developers can also add validations and tune performance parameters such as caching and lazy/eager loading through the designer. The designer also supports a “round-tripping” approach whereby changes to the database can be applied incrementally to the…

Linq to xml provides an easy query interface for XML files. In the following example I will demonstrate how to use it for reading and writing data from/to xml file, using the file for persistency maintaining a list of objects. This can be used for storing application settings, storing persistent objects or any other data [...]

LINQ to SQL maps the relational database into an object model, and when the program runs the queries in the object model are translated into SQL. SQL contains Aggregate functions like SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX and more. Lets see how this functionality can be implemented using LINQ Enumerable standard aggregation operators. You can also create [...]

This one is for all you guys who are just starting to use LINQ and have no idea how to make those queries work.
I have tried it and i am glad to say that it is very friendly and usable especially if you have no experience with Linq
Linqpad is a very user friendly LINQ editor [...]