LINQ For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Other LINQ to Strategies

In This Chapter

• Considering what makes a LINQ solution viable

• Developing a COM+ application

• Developing an RDF application

• Developing a MySQL application

The previous chapters of this book have shown you what appears to be a considerable number of LINQ solutions, but these examples only skim the surface of what LINQ can do. As was shown in Table 1-1, you can find a significant number of LINQ to solutions on the Internet. In fact, you saw two of these LINQ to solutions in Chapters 11 and 12, where you discovered how to work with Office 2007 and Active Directory, respectively. You can probably use LINQ in more places than anticipated or even expected. This chapter examines a few more of the possibilities.

More important than the existing solutions are the solutions you need for your particular needs. Most organizations have custom applications and may wonder whether LINQ will work for them. The interesting thing about LINQ is that it's expandable without resorting to using extreme amounts of low-level code. Yes, you must have good coding skills to write a provider of your own, but as the LINQ to Active Directory example in Chapter 12 shows, you can write a provider using standard C# programming techniques. This chapter also explores some of the issues you must consider before you attempt to write a provider of your own.

Understanding the Qualifications for a LINQ to Solution

Given the right provider, you can use LINQ to technology to connect to just about ...