Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

An Overview of LINQ

LINQ is an acronym for “Language Integrated Query.” It is a component of the .NET Framework 3.5 and above that adds SQL-like querying capabilities to .NET objects. Specifically, it extends the core .NET languages—Visual Basic and C#—and the runtime to try to erase the object-to-database-entity barrier. Visual Basic and C# both support new query operators that operate over objects similar to the way SQL operates over tables in a database.

For example, you could query for all approved invoice objects like this:

And runtime support is introduced for physically translating objects and methods to and from their database equivalents ...