Interested in winning a copy of Halo 3 Legendary Edition and some Apress .NET books? Well, all you have to do is enter our LINQ Contest and the prizes could be yours. Have fun and good luck!

Scott Guthrie gave a presentation to the Visual Studio User Group (VISUG) in Belgium showcasing one of the most recent VS “Orcas” builds.

I’ve held off linking to it, since there seems to be a problem with the video feed on MSDN which causes it keep crashing IE at inopportune moments. It’s better than it was a few days ago, but still not perfect. If you persevere, though the first half of the presentation is worth listening to (skip to 5:00 to jump the VISUG introductions).

It’s an ASP.NET 2.0 tool for generating and manipulating websites directly from database schema. You’ll find it in the asp.net sandbox here.

As you’ll have guessed from the name, rather than using SQL Server queries BLINQ relies on the forthcoming LINQ (Language Integrated Query) technology that’s being released as part of the .NET 3.0 Framework alongside Visual Studio ‘Orcas’ this coming summer/fall. I’ve been playing with it a little over the last few days and I must say that it’s rather good. If you’re developing web applications and have an instance of Visual Studio 2005 installed (Express will do), I suggest you give it a try. As the sandbox page says, you’ll need the May CTP of LINQ.