Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Understanding Providers

The .NET Framework 4.6 provides the ability of using LINQ against six built-in kinds of data sources, which are summarized in Table 22.1.

TABLE 22.1 LINQ Standard Providers

A specific LINQ implementation exists, according to the data source (objects, datasets, SQL databases, and XML documents). Such implementations are known as standard providers. Due to their importance, each provider is covered in a specific chapter (but Parallel LINQ is covered in Chapter 41, “Parallel Programming and Parallel LINQ,” because it requires some concepts about the parallel programming first). LINQ implementation is also referred to as ...