LINQ is one of the few technologies that you can start to use without a lot of preliminary learning. Also, it lends itself to learning by trying out examples. With Michael Sorens' help, you can watch as your conventional C# code changes to ravenous LINQ before your very eyes.  Read more...

Did you know that by precompiling LINQ queries you might actually be degrading your app’s performance if you’re not careful? Julie Lerman explains how to ensure you’re not re-precompiling queries each time and losing the expected performance benefits across post-backs, short-lived service operations and other code where critical instances are going out of scope.  Read more...

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Read a sample chapter from this new book about C# and LINQ from Murach.  Read more...

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As XML has become a popular means to store data for ease of interoperability, how do we use LINQ to query XML data?  Read more...

Prasanna Amirthalingam provides an overview of Entity Framework and how it can be used. He shows that it can provide an excellent interface between the Object-oriented model and the relational. The Entity Framework allows developers to work with data in the form objects and properties without having to concern themselves directly with either the stored procedures or functions of the defined interface, or the the underlying database tables and columns where this data is stored.  Read more...

Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) is a groundbreaking innovation in Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework version 3.5 that bridges the gap between the world of objects and the world of data. As LINQ is part of the development enhancements in SQL Server 2008, how can I have an understanding of how it works and how I can use it in other areas of administration, not just SQL Server?  Read more...

The need to test a program that accesses and manipulates a back-end SQL Server® database is very common. In many such cases, the application interacts with the back-end data through the use of SQL stored procedures. In this type of scenario, you can think of the stored procedures as auxiliary methods of the system under test; and they must therefore be tested just like any other module in the system.  Read more...

LINQ to Objects and LINQ to Entities have an arsenal of Standard Query Operators that operate on sequences to perform a wide variety of operations.  Read more...