I was chatting to Rob last month and mentioned that I'd be interested in doing a talk about LINQ to SQL for the Adelaide SQL User Group.

I thought that Rob might slot me in later in the year, but no! He asked me to present at the February meeting, on Thursday 15th at 12 noon (Register here if you'd like to attend)

I'm conscious that I'm a developer by trade, and this is actually a SQL group where a fair number of attendees are more on the DBA/IT Pro side of the fence. So I'm going to try as much as possible to keep a good balance between showing "developer" code samples and also looking at what is happening on the SQL end.

I had hoped to be able to use the January CTP of Visual Studio "Orcas" to base the presentation on, but after downloading a few gigs worth of .ISO files, I discovered that the LINQ to SQL stuff is basically broken (Broken link, was originally forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1139799&SiteID=1) in that release.

So, I'm back to using the May 2006 CTP which installs on top of Visual Studio 2005.

I've read that there will be a February CTP (Broken link, was originally forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1112535&SiteID=1) of Orcas that should have a working version of LINQ to SQL, but I have no idea if that will be released in time for me to update the talk to take into account the changes since May last year.