Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework

Chapter 1. Taking a New Approach to Data Access in ADO.NET 3.5

Visual Studio (VS) 2008 SP1 is a major upgrade to Visual Studio 2005 and the Visual Basic 8.0 and C# 2.0 languages. ADO.NET 3.5 introduces many new language and data access features to ADO.NET 2.0 and its DataSet-oriented programming model. The primary objectives of these additions are to:

• Increase programmer productivity by reducing the amount of code required to complete a particular data-related task, such as querying and updating relational data sources, DataSets, or XML documents

• Enable strong type-checking of query syntax for relational data and query resultsets

• Reduce or eliminate what's often called the impedance mismatch between the code for managing data, which usually involves Structured Query Language (SQL), and object-oriented (OO) programming

• Provide data-intensive Windows form projects with a local, synchronizable data cache derived from SQL Server Compact Edition v3.5

• Enhance DataSet integration with n-tier architecture

VS attempts to accomplish the preceding objectives with the following new LINQ language extentions to C# and VB, domain-specific implementations, and LINQ-related components or frameworks:

• Language Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions to the Visual Basic 9.0 and C# 3.0 languages and compilers provide developers with a set of standard query operators to query a variety of data sources with a standard query language similar to SQL. LINQ extensions to VB and C# are said to implement the LINQ pattern ...