Thursday, December 13, 2007 11:32 AM
On December 3, I spoke at the Cedar Rapids INETA meeting about LINQ. Titled, A New World of Data Access with LINQ, I had a great time sharing my enthusiasm about the newest data access technologies for .NET developers. LINQ is fully supported in Visual Studio 2008, even Express editions. I just love how LINQ unifies data access between databases, in-memory collections, and XML sources. The language constructs are a bit of a departure from standard programming, yet I felt acclimated to them pretty quickly. Of course there's a whole range of features that I haven't dug into yet. As with traditional SQL, there are some pretty advanced ways to manipulate the data. Being able to declare data queries on collections rather than explicitly iterating and copying/moving elements to sub-collections is powerful and enables you to work with the data as you want, with significantly less code.
If you've ignored it so far, don't! Declarative programming (which deserves its own post) is the way to go and LINQ gets you there on the data front. WinFX technologies from .NET 3.0 (WPF, WCF, WF) are another big part in that. Writing low-level code is a standard way of getting work done, but it really pays to learn these new technologies. Get started with some of these links: