ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

A.2. ADO.NET 3.5

ADO.NET 3.5 is the third major release of ADO.NET after ADO.NET 2.0 and was introduced together with the .NET Framework 3.5.

As a bit of background, the previous version of the .NET Framework—version 3.0—is a superset of .NET Framework version 2.0 with the addition of four major new components:

• Windows Communication Framework (WCF)

• Windows Presentation Framework (WPF)

• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

• Windows CardSpace (WCS)

There was no new version of ADO.NET released in .NET Framework 3.0.

This section provides an overview of new features in ADO.NET 3.5.

LINQ

Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) is a technology introduced in .NET Framework 3.5 that let you express queries directly in programming languages rather than as string literals in the application code. C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0 introduce language extensions that implement LINQ—compilers for these languages ship with .NET Framework 3.5.

LINQ provides standard query and update mechanisms that can potentially support any type of data store, thereby unifying the syntax for querying any data source. LINQ creates a unified programming model for working with objects, relational data, and XML data with LINQ providers that let you access these data sources with LINQ.

LINQ to Objects

Provides query capabilities over in-memory data collection objects that implement IEnumerable or IEnumerable<T> including user-defined Lists, Arrays, Dictionaries, and .NET collections.

LINQ to ADO.NET

Provides query capabilities over any enumerable ...