John Paul Meuller wrote a nice high-level article on LINQ for CIO magazine, "5 Things the Boss Should Know about Microsoft LINQ". Some guy posted a negative comment to the article, for whatever reason I can't understand. I use LINQ every day, even on existing projects that were built without LINQ for database access.  There are probably some things that would make LINQ better, but I can't find any negatives to it.

Rick Strahl wrote an excellent article on getting started with Subversion. I've used SVN and ToriseSVN on a few different projects and they are nice tools. Check out the article, Setting Up and Running Subversion and Tortise SVN with Visual Studio and .NET.  BTW, I highly recommend CoDe Magazine.

If you're using TransactionManager for a distributed transaction, you'll need to enable DTC to get it to work.  In earlier times, all you you needed to do was start the DTC service and everything was good. However, with security increasing with each OS service pack and version, you have to do a little more to turn the DTC on and get it to work. After having to configure this on Vista a few times, I realized that other people will continue to cross this bump in the road as I have.  First, here's a Blog entry from Bil Lin that explains how to configure component services:

 

 

While that is a good explanation, it isn't the whole story because it doesn't just work after you configure component services.  Here are a few more tips to get you going:

 

1. If you've never used the command prompt, you might be confused on how to run dcomcnfg.  Starting the component service manager, dcomcnfg, means that you must open the Command Prompt by selecting All Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt, and then just typing dcomcnfg.

2. You need to allow DTC through your firewall - so open Control Panel, Windows Firewall, Allow a program through the firewall, and there's a box for Distributed Transaction Coordinator you can check to enable it.

3. DCOM must be configured on the Server to allow remote connections and you must enable DTC on the server.

4. Once you've configured the DTC, it will tell you that it has restarted the service, you run your code again, and receive the same error. I've found that the DTC still doesn't work until after I've rebooted my computer.

 

*UPDATE* 8/29/08

 

In Vista, you'll receive a message asking you if you would like to allow DTC to run, after step #1.  However, this still doesn't open your firewall, meaning that you must perform step #2, regardless of what Vista told you.

Scott Guthrie's LINQ to SQL Visualizer is a VS2008 Debugger Visualizer for LINQ to SQL queries. Part of a must-have tools list: