Great introduction to the LINQ Project by Paul Vick.
“LINQ stands for “Language Integrated QUery.” LINQ fundamentally is about integrating query operations into the .NET platform in a comprehensive and open manner. It’s also about providing a unified way for you to query across any kind of data that you have in your program, whether it’s relational, objects or XML. This, we believe, will represent a tectonic shift in the way that VB programmers will work with data. The possibilities that having query capabilities always available right at your fingertips, regardless of the type of data you’re working with, are immense and will fundamentally alter the way people program.
The core of LINQ is a set of API patterns. I say “patterns” instead of “interfaces” or “classes” because we want to maintain maximum flexibility in our ability to provide querying for any kind of data, regardless of whether it has a particular object model or interface implemented. These API patterns specify how an object model can become “queryable,” and they cover all the basic query operations that we know and love: projection (select), filter (where), grouping (group by), ordering (order by), joining (join), etc. By implementing this API pattern, any data provider on .NET can become queryable. There is also a lot of flexibility as to how a data provider can become flexible — i.e., whether it wants to delegate most of the work on querying or whether it wants to do all the work itself.
(It’s also important to note that these patterns are fully compatible with .NET 2.0 and require no additional platform features. They’re totally implementable in VS 2005, so you won’t need a new CLR to use them.)
We will also be providing three implementations of the LINQ API patterns that cover 95% of the types of data that people need to query: relational, object and XML. First, we will provide a set of “standard query operators” that will make the interface IEnumerable(Of T), the fundamental collection interface on the .NET platforms, queryable. Second, we will provide a component called “DLinq” that implements a query-enabled object/relational mapping service which allows querying over remote relational data. And third, we will provide a component called “XLinq” that implements a very lightweight, query-enabled XML DOM. By hitting each element of the ROX equation, we believe we will provide a query solution for most situations right out of the box...”
Learn more.
Click here for the MSDN official LINQ Project section.