Programming .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Second Edition

7. LINQ

.NET 3.5 introduces LINQ, a mechanism for manipulating collections of objects. This chapter shows how you can use LINQ capabilities such as selecting, ordering, filtering, and aggregating to simplify the retrieval, display, modification, and persistence of data.

7.1 Overview

WHEN RELATIONAL DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (DBMSs) first burst on the scene in the 1970s one of their capabilities that helped fuel their universal acceptance was SQL, or Structured Query Language. Prior to SQL, all data was retrieved from DBMSs programmatically. For instance:

Find the record in this file with this value in this column, then walk this chain of records until you find one with that value in that column, then add that record to a temporary file of ...