Republished with Permission - Original Article
Over the last few months I wrote a series of blog posts that
covered some of the new language features that are coming with the Visual
Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas" release. Here are pointers
to the posts in my series:
Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection
Initializers
Extension Methods
Lambda Expressions
Query Syntax
Anonymous Types
The above language features help make querying
data a first class programming concept. We call this overall querying
programming model "LINQ" - which stands for .NET Language Integrated
Query.
Developers can use LINQ with any data source. They
can express efficient query behavior in their programming language of
choice, optionally transform/shape data query results into whatever format they
want, and then easily manipulate the
results. LINQ-enabled languages can provide full type-safety
and compile-time checking of query expressions, and development tools can
provide full intellisense, debugging, and rich refactoring support
when writing LINQ code.
LINQ supports a very rich extensibility model
that facilitates the creation of very efficient domain-specific
operators for data sources. The "Orcas" version of the .NET
Framework ships with built-in libraries that enable LINQ support against
Objects, XML, and Databases.
