Visual Studio® 2008 ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter IV.7. LINQ

In This Chapter

Earlier chapters of this book use SQL Server as a data store and then use the objects that Visual Studio makes available to access the data in the databases. And although that's a large portion of data access techniques, there's more to managing data than database storage. The new kid on the block is Language Integrated Query (LINQ). Seemingly, every Web site on.NET technologies is talking about it.

LINQ, which is integrated into the newest versions of C# and VB.NET, helps you organize your data structures in a manner similar to how databases organize data. Similar to SQL, you can query program data. For instance, say you have a list of data structures, and you want to find the one that has an ID of 26. You can use LINQ to query the data and find the structure you're looking for.

LINQ is not just an enhancement to the collection classes. Instead, it's built right into the language. Yup, the querying capabilities are built right into the language. You can run queries against pretty much any kind of data — not just collections. This is one of those language features that you'll wonder how you got along without. LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompasses language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities.

Using LINQ to Query Integers

LINQ is so simple that the best way to see how to use ...