More Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#

5. Working with LINQ

The driving force behind the language enhancements to C# 3.0 was LINQ. The new features and the implementation of those features were driven by the need to support deferred queries, translate queries into SQL to support LINQ to SQL, and add a unifying syntax to the various data stores. Chapter 4 shows you how the new language features can be used for many development idioms in addition to data query. This chapter concentrates on using those new features for querying data, regardless of source.

A goal of LINQ is that language elements perform the same work no matter what the data source is. However, even though the syntax works with all kinds of data sources, the query provider that connects your query to the actual data source ...