Wrox - Professional LINQ

Introduction
It has been three years and I’m still trying to get the word ‘‘grok’’ into everyone’s mainstream vocabulary (see the introductions to my last two books), and one of the things that I am ‘‘grokking’’ is the new LINQ technology coming out of the Microsoft campus.

Microsoft is touting LINQ as a ‘‘groundbreaking innovation’’ that promises to ‘‘revolutionize the way developers work with data.’’ Like you, I was somewhat skeptical about these promises because similar comments have been funneled our way in the past, but these bold declarations would cause even the casual developer to stop and take notice.

Let me just say right here that the more I got into LINQ, the more excited I became (and the more guilty I felt about not believing the hype). And this isn’t just any mere excitement; this is on par with a 10-year-old waking up Christmas morning to a pirate’s share of loot under the Christmas tree. Why? Because LINQ introduces queries (the concept of a query) as a first-class language construct in both C# and Visual Basic. No longer do you need to learn multiple technologies to query multiple data sources. It is a single query syntax for querying XML, SQL databases, ADO.NET DataSets, and other data sources.

LINQ simplifies how you will now write queries. If you use C# or Visual Basic, you will be able to start writing LINQ queries immediately because you know most of what you need. LINQ is a set of features built into Visual Studio 2008 that incorporates tremendous query capabilities directly into the language syntax of Visual Basic and C#. This provides the benefits of IntelliSense, compile-time type checking, and debugging support. How could life get any better?

Who This Book Is For
This book is for developers who want to learn about LINQ and how it can benefit and enhance their applications. Equally, this book is for those individuals who have spent at least a little time looking at LINQ, have done some experimental development with it, and want to delve deeper into the technology to see how LINQ can improve their applications.

A good understanding of Visual Studio and the C# language will be useful when reading this book and working with the examples, but it is not required. An understanding of SQL Server and T-SQL also would be useful but is not required.

Some of the topics covered include:

• LINQ Queries
• LINQ and the Standard Query Operators
• Programming with XLinq
• Querying XML with XLinq
• Mixing XML and other data models
• DLinq and Queries
• LINQ over datasets
• Interoperating with ADO.NET
• LINQ and ASP.NET