I came across this little nifty application called LINQPad by Joseph Albahari. Its free and just a plain executable with no installation needed.

Like with Management Studio you can query your SQL Database but instead with LINQ. 

It even gives you a Lambda expression for you query, so that you can tune your queries.

I normally do a lot of queries to various databases every day with SQL from Management Studio, but to practice my LINQ skills I'm currently doing these with LINQPad instead.

It supports LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML and contains 200 examples from the book C# 3.0 in a Nutshell.

Actually you can execute any C# 3 og VB9 snippet, so its great for experimenting.

LINQPad Download: http://www.linqpad.net/

For almost a year, I have been the tech lead at the danish entrepreneur site Amino.

Besides being the probably foremost forum for entrepreneurs in Denmark, we have launched a number of services catering for all business owners - the flagship and breadwinner being a site, where you can sell, buy or merge companies online: http://www.amino.dk/virksomhedsbors/ (Beware, its in danish)

We are very agile, and we move extremely fast on changes - this obviously has some cost, and we now have several sites, that are rather similar - or at the least - have a lot of similar features and/or look and feel. But they are growing apart, and we need a more uniform platform to build our future sites on.

Therefore we have chosen to rebuild the platform, with all the experience we have gained through the last year, and embracing our agility and love for new technology, we have decided to move to ASP.NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 - and we will be using LINQ to SQL and the MVC framework.

From one perspective it might be construed as somewhat of a daring venture for an actual production site, on the other hand we do feel very confident when evaluating the benefits we will achieve, as they really support our way of doing things really well. Furthermore we have the experience and capabilities as developers to handle the problems that we no doubt will encounter.

I have decided that I will document this journey as we go along, posting our thoughts, experiences, problems and victories. Both hoping to get help from peers, when everything falls apart, and to help others who in the future will take the same journey.

The journey begins next week, and you can expect about 1 large summation and 1 or 2 smaller notes on specific technical matters every week.