I've been using LINQ (with SqlMetal) a lot lately with MVC. I needed to grab a random single record. To my surprise there didn't appear to be a way to do this. I found an interesting post that confirms this and provides a workaround.
http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2008/01/10/randomizing-linq-to-sql-queries.aspx
The workaround is to create a function which returns a newid. As the function can be mapped by SqlMetal the function will be available for sorting server side. Interesting… just a shame the function NEWID() isn't part of DLINQ.
