Boy, news travels fast on the Internet!  Awhile back, my fellow SharePoint MVP Carlos Segura Sanz came up with a pretty nifty tool that lets you create CAML queries using T-SQL syntax.  It's called YACAMLQT for "Yet Another CAML Query Tool", and you can read all about it here. 

Basically, it lets you write a query like this:

WHERE ContentType="My Content Type"
OR Description<>null
GROUPBY Title DESC
ORDERBY _Author, AuthoringDate, AssignedTo ASC

YACAMLQT then parses the text and produces a CAML query that looks like this:

Pretty cool, eh?

So I got to thinking, "Why not extend the tool to generate CAML.NET code?".  Then you would have the convenience of T-SQL with the power and extensibility of C#.

Well, wouldn't you know it?  Carlos was already way ahead of me.  In fact, he had already implemented it.  Here is a screenshot of the latest version of YACAMLQT, that now has an extra tab containing the generated CAML.NET code!

I'm working with Carlos to extend his tool to support some additional feature, like adding a SELECT clause so you can easily specify the view fields.  I'm also looking at ways to incorporate the YACAMLQT parser directly into the CAML.NET framework so you could do things like pass a T-SQL string to an existing CamlQuery instance to take advantage of the built-in data binding features of CAML.NET.

Look for updates to appear soon on both our blogs, and also on the CAML.NET Project on CodePlex.  In the meantime, you can download the updated YACAMLQT tool from the following link:

 YACAMLQT.zip (15,07 KB).