LinqPad Spatial Challenge

To get up to speed with new things in C# 4.0, I’ve been reading C# 4.0 In A Nutshell by Joseph and Ben Albahari.

To illustrate examples, the book uses LinqPad, a freely downloadable tool. I recommend the book, and I highly recommend LinqPad.

Still, there is room for improvement with LinqPad. The author of LinqPad has presented the LINQPad Challenge, with the following rules:

1. Locate the shortcut for SQL Management Studio (SSMS) on your Start Menu and move it some place else.
2. In its place, insert a shortcut to LINQPad.
3. For the next week, perform all your ad-hoc SQL queries using only LINQPad.

If you’re like me though, you may not feel up to this challenge. I have grown attached to SSMS’s spatial query viewer, which is lacking in LinqPad. It would be great if someone would write a custom Data Context Driver for LinqPad so that spatial query output from ArcObjects could be displayed on a map, just as it is in SSMS.

It seems like this would also allow the geodatabase implementation to be abstracted, removing dependencies on SQL Server, so maybe someone from ESRI could justify doing this.

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