Many times after running an expensive query, I realize that there's one more navigation property that I want to see the results of following it. Currently that means rewriting the initial query enough to do so and then re-running the entire query.

The idea is that instead, when an entity/row is written to the output, it includes cells for the navigation properties as well (not just scalar ones) with those cells containing buttons, or links, or whatever such that the user can 'trigger' them while interacting with the results pane.

This would both prevent users from having to re-create and re-run their queries as they're interactively exploring data, and make LINQPad a great data exploration tool. For instance, I could then run a simple query to get a Customer object, but then interactively (in the results pane) follow navigation properties off of it for address, orders, etc.

If the idea of making the results pane interactive (and having the content modified as the user clicks the button/link/whatever to follow an entity's navigation property) is too far 'out there' for LINQPad with the current codebase, something that might be more viable is to have the navigation property follow either 1) append to the results (so the resulting entit(y/ies) would be just appended to the end of results, or perhaps in another tab. The key bit, I think, is that during the initial dump of results, we should know the necessary query to follow a particular entity's navigation property, so we could write that as 'script text' behind that button/link/whatever in the results window.

If there's something that does this kind of interactive following of navigation properties (maybe some existing WPF app?), please feel free to point me at it - I can certainly understand if this is deemed out of scope for LINQPad. :)