Here is a little introduction about PDFSharp:

• PDFsharp is the Open Source library that easily creates PDF documents from any .NET language.
  The same drawing routines can be used to create PDF documents, draw on the screen, or send output to any printer.
• It can use either GDI+ or WPF.
• It includes support for Unicode in PDF files.
• It also includes MigraDoc Lite which brings you all the high-level functionality not included in PDFsharp.

Using PDFSharp is very simple. the samples in the official download file are more than enough to learn the functionality of PDFSharp.here is a little piece of code I used to merge A collection of PDFs in a folder to a single PDF file.

   1:  PdfDocument inputDocument=

   2:                  PdfReader.Open(file.FullName,PdfDocumentOpenMode.Import);

   3:  int count = inputDocument.PageCount;

   4:    for (int idx = 0; idx < count; idx++)

   5:     {

   6:         // Get the page from the external document...

   7:         PdfPage page = inputDocument.Pages[idx];

   8:         // ...and add it to the output document.

   9:         outputDocument.AddPage(page);

  10:     }

  11:  

  12:  outputDocument.Save(filename);

if you want to download the full sample I created download it  here.

if you want to download pdfSharp Library visit the site below:

http://www.pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp

And this Starter Kit Show case includes an awsum MSDN Reader. The MSDN Reader allows you to browse through MSDN Magazine articles like never before. Read through articles, view figures and code snippets in an intuitive and easy-to-use experience. The complete source code for the reader is also provided for us to download here.

Its totally free. and I would say its a must have for we developers. so what are you waiting for install it!

Download it here
Source Code
Syndication Starter Kit home

so I decided to help them all out, but I don’t want to fill the blogsphere with another post of LINQ, WPF or WCF, because its already filled with a lot of articles on them by geek’s and various people around the world.so what I’m going to do is post some valuable links on where you can give a kick start on learning these.

1. To get visual studio 2008 read the post here.
2. The first and best place I would recommend to learn is reading Scott Guthrie’s web blog. he had written some excellent articles on these new technologies. I would recommend you to subscribe his blogs feeds or book marking his blog for future reference. here is are some valuable articles by him.
   1. Using LINQ with ASP.Net in VS 2008.
   2. Scott Guthrie - First Look at ORCAS.
   3. New “ORCAS” C# 3.0 Language Features: Automatic Properties, Object Initializers and Collection Initializers.
   4. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Extension Methods.
   5. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Lambda Expressions.
   6. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Query Syntax.
   7. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Anonymous Types.
   8. and the following are Scott’s posts on LINQ
      • • Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL
        • Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes
        • Part 3: Querying our Database
        • Part 4: Updating our Database
        • Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control
        • Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures
        • Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures
        • Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions
        • Part 9: Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the Control
3. Another Place to Learn About LINQ is LINQ in Action . this site with its popularity has been written as a book also for more information visit here.
4. And now for WPF. here are the web sites which helped me to build my WPF knowledge.
   1. Windows Client official web site WPF Video Tutorials
   2. The Content Presenter
   3. The WPF Blog
5. And so far to lean Silverlight would recommend the official Silverlight web site.
6. and below are some more links which you might be interested in:
   1. Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ)
   2. ASP.Net 3.5 Video Tutorials.
   3. 101 LINQ Samples.
   4. Xceed WPF Data Grid Component -Free full Version (1 Developer Licence ).
7. And finally The Official Visual studio 2008 training kit by Microsoft

Well These are the sites which I visit often to learn about these new technologies. I’m just sharing these with you to make it easy to find about these and learn them easily without spending much time to search for these.

I hope it helped you, Enjoy!!.

And few more minutes of research I found out how to perform bulk operations against the databases using OPENXML and stored procedures.

What is OPENXML?

OPENXML is a function added to SQL Server 2000 that provides a row set view over an XML document. Since a row set is simply a set of rows that contain columns of data, OPENXML is the function that allows an XML document to be treated in the familiar relational database format. It allows for the passing of an XML document to a T-SQL stored procedure for updating the data.

OPENXML- Summery

• It extends the SQL Language
• It is used within T-SQL Stored Procedures
  • XML Document passed as parameter
• It uses row and column selectors utilizing XPath
• It supports the following:
  • Attribute and element-centric mappings.
  • Edge table row set.
  • XML annotation/overflow column.
  • Hierarchy support.

OPENXML and ADO.Net

This code block explains the usage of OPENXML to insert bulk data to database. It simulates the actual process I wanted ( processing .eml files) by reading files in a folder and saving their names, created date and size in bytes.

1. First create the table below:
   

   CREATE TABLE FileDetails(

   FileName varchar(50) PRIMARY KEY,

   CreatedDate varchar(50) ,

   Size decimal(18, 0) )

2. And then create the stored procedure below:
   

   CREATE PROC sp_bulkinsert @xmldata varchar(max)

   AS

   DECLARE @hDoc int

   exec sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT,@xmldata

   –inserting data

   Insert Into FileDetails

   SELECT FileName, CreatedDate, Size

   FROM OPENXML (@hdoc, ‘/ds/fileDetails’,2)

   WITH (FileName varchar(50), CreatedDate Datetime, Size decimal) XMLFileDetails

   Where XMLFileDetails.FileName Not IN (Select FileName from FileDetails)

   EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hDoc

   GO

3. The below sample code snippet shows how to call this stored procedure to insert bulk data to database at once.

We can retrieve the file details using FileInfo() objects and create a Dataset of the file details and then we can convert this Dataset to xml using WriteXml() Method of the Dataset.

private static string preparexml(DataSet ds)

{

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb);

ds.WriteXml(sw, XmlWriteMode.WriteSchema);

return sb.ToString();

}

This xml representation of the data can be passed as the parameter to the stored procedure as given below :

private static void bulkInsert(string xml)

{

try{

SqlConnection con = creatCon();

con.Open();

SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(”sp_bulkinsert”, con);

cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;

cmd.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter(”@xmldata”,SqlDbType.VarChar));

cmd.Parameters["@xmldata"].Value=xml;

cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

Console.WriteLine(”Completed inserting file informations to database”);

con.Close();

}

catch(Exception ex)

{

Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);

}

}

That’s all simple isn’t it? You can see the performance of this method by writing another code to insert the same fields using the traditional 1 at a time way. Which surprisingly will show a huge difference in performance and time.

You can use the same way to update, delete records in bulk.

The complete code can be downloaded and tested in the below link :

Complete Source Code