In my quest to get a better grasp of LINQ and Lambdas, I came across the “LinqPad” tool. This free tool, written in 2007 but continually updated through the 3.5 .NET framework, was graciously written by Joseph Albahari and provides features up and beyond Linq. Though the primary focus is Linq, this tool is excellent for testing your VB and C# snippets. I have a numerous Visual Studio solutions just for testing code snippet and this tool easily wipes out most of them.
At first, I had difficulty figuring out how to enter my syntax effectively but the incredibly helpful (and free) webinar from Albahari cleared up my questions in under an hour. Attaching a datasource to the tool was very easy and with the extra features, such as importing namespaces, users can everything from data querying to C# code testing to testing RegEx to pinging websites.
The tool also supports XML/XPath/XQuery, VB, F#, SQL, and ESQL.