Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework

Chapter 8. Exploring Third-Party and Emerging LINQ Implementations

The C# 3.0 team designed LINQ to be extensible so Microsoft and third-party developers could write domain-specific LINQ derivatives. When Microsoft launches an intriguing new language feature, such as LINQ, the release unleashes evangelism by internal groups and rapid exploitation by independent software developers. Visual Studio 2008's LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML and LINQ to DataSet, and ADO.NET's LINQ to Entities were Microsoft's only RTM domain-specific LINQ products when this book was written. However, the following four LINQ implementation projects were in the development stage at Microsoft in mid-2008:

• Parallel LINQ (also called PLINQ) enables you to take advantage of parallel process of LINQ queries by multiple-core processors. PLINQ is part of the Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5, which the Parallel Fx team released as a Community Technical Preview (CTP) on December 5, 2007. The latest version was the June 2008 CTP when this book was written.

• LINQ to REST is an implementation for translating LINQ queries into Representational State Transfer URLs that define a request to a Web service. LINQ to REST debuted as a component of Web-based ADO.NET Data Services (formerly codenamed "Project Astoria") in a December 9, 2007 CTP. .NET 3.5 SP1 includes the release first release version.

• LINQ to XSD is an incubator project to update the LINQ version from VS 2008 Beta 1 to VS 2008 RTM; Chapter 1's "LINQ to ...