LINQ Quickly

A Practical Guide to Programming Language Integrated Query with C#
- LINQ to Objects
- LINQ to XML
- LINQ to SQL
- LINQ to DataSets
- LINQ to XSD
In Detail
This book gets you started with LINQ and shows how it will make your programming life easier by making use of new features from the .NET Framework 3.0. This book is split into seven chapters, each of which is dedicated to presenting a feature of LINQ and its usage in real-life scenarios.
Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a new feature in Visual Studio 2008 that extends its query capabilities, using C# and Visual Basic. Visual Studio 2008 comes with LINQ provider assemblies that enable the use of LINQ with data sources such as in-memory collections, SQL relational databases, ADO.NET Datasets, XML documents, etc.
In Visual Studio 2008, Visual C# and Visual Basic are the languages that implement the LINQ language extensions. LINQ language extensions use the new standard query operators API, which is the query language for any collection that implements IEnumerable.
What you will learn from this book?
- Overview of new features for LINQ in .NET 3.0–partial methods, expressions, anonymous types, initializers, and implicitly typed local variables
- Accessing in-memory data structures using LINQ–lists, arrays, and dictionaries
- Directly querying the collections and filtering the required values without using powerful filtering, ordering, and grouping capabilities
- Creating and manipulating XML data through .NET using XElement and XAttribute
- Creating and navigating XML trees using Functional Construction
- Importing and exporting data from dictionaries, databases, objects, and CSV files
- Creating and manipulating the database objects using the DataContext object
- Working with stored procedures, user-defined functions, handling concurrency conflicts, and transactions during database updates
- Working with .NET framework data providers and DataSets
- Using DataSet for easier and faster querying of cached data
- Working with typed and un-typed XML trees using XSD
- Examining standard query operators provided by LINQ and using them to query data sources
- Implementing your own standard query operators
Building an ASP.NET web application
Approach
This book introduces the reader to the basic concepts of LINQ, and takes them through using LINQ with an example-driven approach.
Who this book is written for?
This book is for .NET developers who want to find out exactly what LINQ is, what it can do for them, and how to program with LINQ. This book presumes a sound knowledge of XML, ADO.NET, and .NET data access–No knowledge of LINQ is presumed.