After a bit of umming and arrrring I managed to make quite a bit of headway with a project I’ve been mulling over for a while – LinqToLfsWorld. It’s a custom LINQ provider which allows the client to communicate with LfsWorld via its Pubstat web service.
What is that exactly? Live For Speed (LFS) is (primarly) an online racing simulator, and LFSWorld is an online base for checking your racing stats, viewing and comparing hotlaps and watching other races in real time via a neat flash application. Pubstat is it’s webservice which you can query to retrieve information about racers, hosts, teams and hotlaps. You send it a url and it will return either JSON, PHP or XML formatted responses.
Since it’s url based, and it has a fairly simple interface, Ithought it would be a good introduction into finding out what it takesto build a custom LINQ provider. My implementation isn’t great nortotally versatile (yet), but it works and I’m pretty pleased with theproject so far.
The reason the release is tagged as 0.8 Preview is because there’s acouple of issues I’d like to sort out before I give it that ‘release1.0′ milestone; the object documentation (currently there isn’t any)and I’d like to work a bit more on the expression visitor, to make thequeries just a bit more friendly.
So, if you’re interested in having a look, please visit the project page on Codeplex and download the latest release and/or the source code and play aroundwith it. Send me any issues if you want via the issue tracker, and feelfree to contact me with any suggestions or queries relating to theproject.
I’m going to publish a couple more articles over the course of thenext couple of weeks as I improve the library, and to show you a couplemore examples on how to use it.