I recently penned an introductory article on LINQ (Language-Integrated Query) for the September issue of the DevelopMents newsletter, published by DevelopMentor to highlight various technologies taught in our courses:

http://www.develop.com/us/email/developments/developments091107.html

In addition, I authored the LINQ module (both slides and lab) for our upcoming Guerilla .Net course taking place Nov 12-16 in Tampa, Florida.

LINQ is an exciting technology that will truly alter the way you write code. It incorporates enhancements made to the C# and VB.Net programming languages, and at the same time will cause you to approach age-old problems from a new perspective. For example, instead of whipping out a for loop to extract specific items from a collection, after learning LINQ you’ll most likely use a query expression, the primary benefit of which is to make your intent as a developer more evident. This follows a trend we’re seeing from an imperative style of code (concerned with the “how”) toward a more declarative style of code (concerned primarily with the “what”).

In addition to a shift in programming models with the ability to query in-memory object collections, the first release of LINQ comes with an object-relational mapper (called LINQ to SQL) and an XML query language (called LINQ to XML). I address both of these in the DevelopMents article mentioned at the start of this post. So take a look, and feel free to send me your feedback or questions: tony@tonysneed.com. ou also might want to check out the LINQ Project home page:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa904594.aspx

Namaste.