Mastering Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2010

Chapter 14. An Introduction to LINQ

In Chapter 12, "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 13, "XML In Modern Programming," you learned how to serialize these collections into XML documents, as well as how to create XML documents from scratch. And in Part V of this book, 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 items. What is common in all data sources ...