Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

Deconstructing LINQ

Let’s get straight into some code and see a very basic LINQ expression in action. Open VS2008 and create a new website called C10_LINQ for all the samples in this chapter. You’ll start by creating and then running some queries over an in-memory list of books to demonstrate the basic query syntax that LINQ offers.

Click Website → Add New Item in VS2008, and then select the Class type to add to the website. Call the new class Book.cs, set its language to C#, and then click Add. Give it the code shown in Example 10-1.

Example 10-1. Book.cs in full

using System; using System.Collections.Generic; public class Book { public string ISBN { get; set; } public string Title { get; set; } public decimal Price { get; set; } public DateTime ReleaseDate { get; set; } public static List<Book> GetBookList() { List<Book> list = new List<Book>(); list.Add(new Book { ISBN = "0596529562", ReleaseDate = Convert.ToDateTime("2008-07-15"), Price = 30.0m, Title = "Programming ASP.NET 3.5" }); list.Add(new Book { ISBN = "059652756X", ReleaseDate = Convert.ToDateTime("2008-06-15"), Price = 26.0m, Title = "Programming .NET 3.5" }); list.Add(new Book { ISBN = "0596518455", ReleaseDate = Convert.ToDateTime("2008-07-15"), Price = 28.0m, Title = "Learning ASP.NET 3.5" }); list.Add(new Book { ISBN = "0596518439", ReleaseDate = Convert.ToDateTime("2008-03-15"), Price = 25.0m, Title = "Programming Visual Basic 2008" }); list.Add(new Book { ISBN = "0596527438", ReleaseDate = Convert.ToDateTime("2008-01-15"), ...