C# in Depth, Third Edition

Part 3. C# 3: Revolutionizing data access

There’s no doubt that C# 2 is a significant improvement over C# 1. The benefits of generics, in particular, are fundamental to other changes, not just in C# 2 but also in C# 3. But C# 2 is in some sense a piecemeal collection of features. Don’t get me wrong: they fit together nicely enough, but they address a set of individual issues. That was appropriate at that stage of C#’s development, but C# 3 is different.

Almost every feature in C# 3 enables one specific technology: LINQ. Many of the features are useful outside this context, and you certainly shouldn’t confine yourself to only using them when you happen to be writing a query expression, but it’d be equally silly not to recognize the complete ...