Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Understanding Providers

The .NET Framework 4.0 provides the ability of using LINQ against six built-in kinds of data sources, which are summarized in Table 23.1.

Table 23.1 LINQ Standard Providers

Therefore there is a specific LINQ implementation 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. LINQ implementation is also referred to as providers or standard providers. There could be situations in which you need to use a custom data source and you would like to take the advantage of ...