Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

What Is LINQ?

The LINQ project has been the most important new feature in .NET Framework 3.5, affecting both Visual Basic 2008 and Visual C# 3.0. LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query and is a project that Microsoft began developing in 2003. The first beta versions saw the light starting from 2005 until it became part of the CLR with .NET 3.5, and due to its importance, it is still part of .NET Framework 4.0. As its name implies, LINQ is a technology that allows querying data directly from the programming language. To understand why LINQ is so important and why it is so revolutionary, we have to first start a brief discussion. Most real-world applications need to access data, by querying, filtering, and manipulating data as well. The word ...