Question

I have a local and development environment, each very similar to each other (OS differences aside). They both run the same project which is making use of the Entity Framework. I use LINQpad quite a bit to interrogate data on both environments — but where required I have access to SQL etc. etc.

So, this is all started with a very strange occurance. Within my business logic layer, I make a call to get a list of Contacts and then marshall that list into a custom type. The custom-type calls for an Initial index based on the name of each of the contacts.

For reference, this is the code that performs the marshalling:-

private static IEnumerable<AlphabetisedContact> _getGroupedContacts(int clientid)
        {
            return _getLiteContacts(clientid).GroupBy(c => c.Name[0]).Select(
                    g => new AlphabetisedContact { Initial = g.Key, Contacts = g.ToList() }).OrderBy(g => g.Initial);
        }

So, this all seems to work fine. Except, it never returns any Contact with the first initial of a. I decided to try and debug this and using LINQpad found a weirdness. Whether this has anything to do with my code not returning a contacts I don’t know (??), but this was the weirdness I found:-

Local Machine:-

Development Machine:-

For the less eagle-eyed of you, the Entity Set Name returned by EF, seems to be different. With the development machine, they’re returned with underscores between words — which is not how the EDMX was setup. For example, it is Name on local, Contact_name on dev. Again, this may have absolutely nothing to do with why I can’t get a contacts. I don’t get errors on the dev box, contacts are returned etc. etc. but I can’t get a contacts.

Can anyone offer some assistance/advice/guidance on how to fix this? It’s become a case of “wood-for-the-trees” now…

Help appreciated.

Answer 1

Turns out this was a catastrophic boo-boo on my part. Please see answer to this on this SO:

Why Won't This LINQ Return A Particular Initial?

Thanks to all who took the time to take a peek – and at least a stab at answer.

😉