Republished With Permission - Original Article

Last month I wrote about the new LINQ language features for VB and C#.  My blog post introduced some of the core concepts of LINQ, and demonstrated how you can use LINQ to perform rich queries over standard .NET business classes and object collections.  I also showed how you could easily bind the results of these queries against ASP.NET controls.  You can read all about how to-do this here.

One of the really powerful aspects of LINQ is that it can be used against any type of object or data source, and provides a consistent programming model for doing this.  LINQ ships with implementations that support LINQ against regular object collections, databases, entities, and XML sources.  Because LINQ supports rich extensibility, developers can also easily integrate LINQ with other data sources and providers as well. 

In this blog post I’m going to provide a quick overview of some of the key LINQ for databases concepts (aka DLINQ), and then walk through a sample that shows how you can start to use LINQ against a database within an ASP.NET 2.0 application. You can download the LINQ May CTP from here and use the steps below with VS 2005 or the free Visual Web Developers Express edition to follow along (note: the LINQ May CTP runs in VS 2005 and does not touch any existing binaries).  You can also download the completed samples I build below from here.