Conarc Staff Blog

IQToolkit started out as a blog series with the purpose of showing how to create an IQueryable provider.  As the series grew, the sample code became a toolkit that could be used to simplify the creation of an IQueryable provider.  Additionally, the toolkit included a few implementations of the framework such as ORMs for Access, MySql, SQL Server, SQL Server Compact, and SQLite.  Out of this list, I could use the SQL Server provider but finding a replacement for LINQ to SQL wasn’t the goal that lead me to the IQToolkit blog series.  The goal was to find an ORM for Visual FoxPro data or find out how to write a provider.  I was unable to find a VFP ORM so I wrote my own (LINQ to VFP) and put it up on codeplex as an open source project.

So to answer the question… Why IQToolkit?  Using this toolkit with the SQL Server provider and the VFP provider allows us to be consistent with our data access code.  In the not so distant past, we were using LINQ to SQL for SQL Server data access which included its nice strongly typed entity classes.  But with VFP data we used DataTables.  Using two different approaches just didn’t feel right.