Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

Going Deeper

LINQ requires an understanding of generics (introduced in .NET 2.0), which provide a means of working with classes in a type-independent manner. That is, a generic class provides methods and properties just like any other class; however, it also has a type parameter that enables users of that class to supply a type at runtime that the algorithms in the class will then operate on. In Listing 45.2, for example, the return type of GetProductsById uses the generic Framework class System.Collections.Generic.List<T>, substituting Product as a type parameter for T.

When working with LINQ to SQL, you also use the new var keyword, which indicates that the named variable is implicitly typed. This means that the compiler will infer the type ...