LINQPad – Inroduction and Installation

​LINQPad is a free tool that dot net developers use. It is like a dot net developer playground because it is used for various purposes. This tool can be used for,

• Writing a LINQ query and test it out.
• Connecting with the database.
• Connecting with the WCF service.
• Write C#, F#, and VB code.

There are many applications that have many clients and one server architecture. But LINQPad uses a different approach. It uses one client and many servers architecture. Every query in LINQPad has a separate server. It comes with some features like syntax highlighting, auto-completion, data representation, and red underlines for incorrect code. LINQPad 5 uses the Microsoft ‘Roslyn‘ library for compiling, parsing, and binding. This makes LINQPad more efficient than any other tool.

Installation in PC

• You can visit the official website of LINQPad. You can download any version of LINQPad. In this tutorial, we are installing LINQPad 7. It is applicable for .Net Core 3.1 to .Net 7.0. Now click on the image below you will be directed to the downloads page of LINQPad.

LINQPadInstall

• Click on that Download button. One .exe file will be downloaded. Double click on that .exe file. One pop-up will be open. You need to click on Next.

Click on next

• This will take some time. After completion of downloading setup click on Finish.

Program in LINQPad to Find the Odd Numbers from an Array of Integers using C#

• We have a list of integers in array

int[] numbers = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10};

We can also use var like this

var numbers = new int[]{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10};

• You can use Where() in LINQ to filter out the result. In this operation, it sequentially traverse the array and returns the condition specified. If the number is not divisible by 0, then it will be an odd number.

• Now if there is a requirement to show the result in descending order. There is an in-build method present in LINQ to sort our results, that is OrderByDescending(). In the argument, you need to use the Lambda expression. After that, the result will be converted to a list with the help of the ToList() method.

List<int> result = numbers

.Where(x => x % 2 != 0)

.OrderByDescending(x => x)

.ToList();

• In the next line of code, you can see the Dump() command. This is very similar to Print () and Console.WriteLine() in other programming languages. It transforms the result into an HTML stream and renders that into an output screen. It makes the output data more presentable. Dump() command can be used only in LINQPad.

result.Dump();

C#

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class GFG
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        int[] numbers = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 };

        List<int> result = numbers
            .Where(x => x % 2 != 0)
            .OrderByDescending(x => x)
            .ToList();

        foreach (var number in result)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(number);
        }
    }
}

Output:

Output

In the output, you can observe the numbers in descending order. It also has some other tabs as well.

• Lambda (ⲗ): This is used to get the lambda equivalent of the LINQ query. This is very useful when you are using a query syntax of LINQ.
• SQL: This is used to generate SQL statements. This SQL query will generate if it is attached to any schema. In the above code, it is linked to objects. There is no associated SQL there.
• IL + Native: It is used to generate Intermediate Language.
• Tree: It is used to take a look at the compilation process of a program. This can be used to observe, how the compilation process runs behind the scenes.
• AI: It is a coding assistant. It is very useful for those developers who are new to programming.

Conclusion

• ​LINQPad provides numerous options to developers for testing and debugging their code.

• It is also used to directly connect with database instances. You don’t need to create an entire application just to check any scenario. Since you can access all the data present, you can perform any number of operations on that.

• Syntax highlighting, autocompletion, features and red underlines for incorrect code are some of the cool features of ​LINQPad.

• Data representation is one of the features that makes ​LINQPad different from other tools. In the final output of the code above code, you can observe that it is returning a List of 5 items and each item has a datatype of int.