The folks at Microsoft aren’t oblivious to the problems of today’s data access story. And so, now that C# 2.0 is almost about to be released, they’ve given us a look at C# 3.0 in the form of the LINQ project. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query framework. The LINQ project’s stated goal is to add "general purpose query facilities to the .NET Framework that apply to all sources of information, not just relational or XML data". The beauty of the LINQ project is twofold.
First, LINQ is integrated directly into your favorite language. Because the underlying API is just a set of .NET classes that operate like any other .NET class, language designers can integrate the functionality these classes expose directly into the language. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the query functionality in LINQ extends to more than just SQL or XML data. Any class that implements IEnumerable can be queried using Linq. That should elicit a feeling of absolute joy in you. Or maybe I’m just weird.
First, LINQ is integrated directly into your favorite language. Because the underlying API is just a set of .NET classes that operate like any other .NET class, language designers can integrate the functionality these classes expose directly into the language. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the query functionality in LINQ extends to more than just SQL or XML data. Any class that implements IEnumerable
