Entity Framework 4 in Action

Appendix A. Understanding LINQ

You’re likely already familiar with the various C# and Visual Basic language innovations and their importance in bringing LINQ to life. But if you haven’t come across LINQ yet, this appendix will introduce you to the project and enumerate its advantages, its requirements in terms of language modifications, and its vision. This is important, because the main query language in Entity Framework is LINQ to Entities, which in the end is a LINQ dialect. Having a solid knowledge of LINQ’s foundations will help you understanding LINQ to Entities queries.

In the first part of this appendix, we’ll cover the reasons why the Microsoft architects decided to embed query extensions into the language, and the broad vision of ...