Republished with Permission - Original Article

Over the last few weeks I've been writing a series of blog posts that cover LINQ to SQL.  LINQ to SQL is a built-in O/RM (object relational mapper) that ships in the .NET Framework 3.5 release, and which enables you to easily model relational databases using .NET classes.  You can use LINQ expressions to query the database with them, as well as update/insert/delete data.

Below are the first four parts of my LINQ to SQL series:

Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL

Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes

Part 3: Querying our Database

Part 4: Updating our Database

In these previous LINQ to SQL blog posts I focused on how you can programmatically use LINQ to SQL to easily query and update data within a database.

In today's blog post I'll cover the new <asp:LinqDataSource> control that is shipping as part of ASP.NET in the upcoming .NET 3.5 release.  This control is a new datasource control for ASP.NET (like the ObjectDataSource and SQLDataSource controls that shipped with ASP.NET 2.0) which makes declaratively binding ASP.NET UI controls to LINQ to SQL data models super easy.