Thanks again to Richard Hale Shaw for driving up to Burlington on Monday (even a flat tire didn't stop him) to give VTdotNETters a very in-depth perspective on LINQ. Rather than just open up VS2008 and start pounding out LINQ queries, Richard spent most of the time building up our understanding of the underlying technology that makes LINQ possible. Custom Iterators, anonymous methods and generics. Then when he showed us LINQ, it made perfect sense.
I know that when I talk about "that which is returned by a LINQ query", I have a hard time saying "it's an iEnumerable" or "an iQueryable". Most people don't get what that means. Richard made it easy to understand by his initial desicription of an iEnumerable being a collection with only the enumerator exposed, so the only thing you can do to the collection is iterate over it. That will help me a lot when I do future talks about LINQ and Entity Framework (which is three of my four talks at DevConnections this fall).
In addition to Richard's generosity with his time and knowledge, big thanks to go telerik who made this meeting possible, covering Richard's travel expenses and our pizza, and providing raffles and lots of fun t-shirts. We also had a few great raffles, thanks to CodeZone.
Although I was wearing my new telerik "Geekette" t-shirt, there were only 2 other gals at the meeting. So when we were down to only one Geekette shirt at the end, I was surprised. Rather than take the regular guy t-shirts, the guys were taking the girlie shirts for their wives, girlfriends and daughters. Awesome!
Watch out for a gaggle of geekettes wandering around Burlington for the rest of this summer.