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.