Today Microsoft announced the latest Community Technical Preview (CTP) of the .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Project. The LINQ Project was mentioned at the last Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and has continued to be discussed since.
LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that enables you to use C# and Visual Basic to directly access and manipulate data. Obviously, these extensions included extensions to the languages as well as the underlying .NET Framework, The results, however, are much simpler and more robust access to data of any times. In fact, you’ll be able to avoid learning other database query languages and focus on your programming language of choice.
This newest release of the LINQ Project includes updates to integrated querying for relational data, objects, and XML. More importantly, support for debugging LINQ code has been added to Visual Studio in this release.
Of course, the best way to understand LINQ is to simply download it and start hacking out some code. You can find the download at:
The download can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1E902C21-340C-4D13-9F04-70EB5E3DCEEA&displaylang=en
And for those that might ask…. Yes, this should work with the Express editions of Visual Basic and Visual C#.
