Mastering Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 17. Querying Collections and XML with LINQ

In Chapter 14, "Storing Data in Collections," you learned how to create collections, from simple arrays to specialized collections such as HashTables and Lists, and how to iterate through them with loops to locate items. Typical collections contain objects, and you already know how to create and manipulate custom objects. In Chapter 16, "Serialization and XML," you learned how to serialize these collections into XML documents, as well as how to create XML documents from scratch. And in Chapter 2, "Basic Concepts of Relational Databases," you'll learn how to manipulate large amounts of data stored in databases.

Each data source provides its own technique for searching and manipulating individual ...