Dots instead of spaces in Studio 2008 while running test cases…

Well I was running my test cases today and suddenly all my white spaces turned into dots. Yes it creeped the heck out of me.

First thing I thought was to get rid of that. Went to Tools and Options and couldn’t find the setting that would get rid of the nauseating dots.

So I started trying all the shortcut keys. But initially nothing worked. Now Ctrl + R + D happens to be a combination that debugs the tests in context. So I thought the key pattern that enables and disables the visible whitespace feature has to be similar.

Discovery: Ctrl + E + S

Left outer join in Entity Framework

This evening I heard someone say that Left Outer Joins are not possible in Entity Framework or perhaps Left Outer Joins are possible, but they bring in all the data and then filter out the right table.

I felt an urge to argue, but I resisted. I thought I would investigate before I waste time. I came up with some articles pretty quickly.

1. Left Outer Join in LINQ
2. Left Outer Join using Inverse Navigation Property
3. DefiningQuery Element
4. Left Outer Join in LINQ to SQL
5. LINQ to Entities with Multiple Left Outer Joins

I am sure these should resolve all questions related to Left Outer Joins.

Now about the performance and the question about how the data is brought, I am pretty sure we can prove that LINQ Queries all support deferred execution. But we can always prove that using the SQL Query Profiler.

Hope this helps.