LINQ Talk at IVCUG

Last Wednesday I did a talk at Israeli Visual C/C++/C# Users Group (IVCUG) on C# 3.0 new features and LINQ. It was my first time taking officially in front of developers audience, and I had so much fun I want to do it again!
I've got a terrific feedback from the participants both in person and by the feedback forms they've filled in after the event. Now I feel I can contribute to the developers community by serving complex technologies in a simple and fun way. I've already suggested Moshe Raab, the group leader number of subject I can do talk on. From the pencil-and-paper feedback results, turns out that folks would like to go deeper into LINQ, and cover the EF. Well, I'm willing to do so with a lot of pleasure.

Just to get things straight, I haven't probably emphasized it, but the purpose of the session was to be a kind of introduction to LINQ. I think it's much more important to understand basics and the background of LINQ, than to dive into operators explanations. Once you understand where have LINQ come from, it is very easy to understand how to continue to the next level. Nowadays we sometimes tend to do the task, without having a deep understanding of what we are doing, and that's a pity, cause most of performance issues and programmatic bugs appear because we either don't understand the business scenario we're working on, or we don't understand the technology we're working with.

I can't help you with understanding the business, it's either you've got it or not, but the latter issue can be solved easily. There is a new movement in the world of programming, that calls every developer to go back to basics from time to time and recall what are the basic concepts of technologies we're working with. For example, why should we know where in memory the CLR stores our variables or objects? That is until we've got some strange exception yelling something about out of stack space...

One of the talks I'd like to do at one the further sessions is "Back to basics", were I'll cover things like memory management, objects desposal, garbage collector, some threading, event handlers, unit testing basics and more. I'd like to hear your opinion on that.
Other ideas for the forthcoming sessions are:

• "20000 leagues with LINQ" - more advanced session on LINQ, including LINQ-to-XML, operators for groupping, joining, etc...
• "Building LOB applications with LINQ-to-SQL" - we're going to build a simple line-of-business n-teir application with LINQ-to-SQL, discussing many issues we'll need to solve.
• "Entity Framework v1.0 Test Drive" - an overview of new EF in VS2008 SP1.

Tell me what you think.

The slides from the session are attached to this post.
Have fun!