Guide to LINQ and VB.NET
All of the About Visual Basic articles about using LINQ in VB.NET into one place.
LINQ to Objects
LINQ to Objects was misnamed by Microsoft. It should really be LINQ to Collections, but somebody probably decided that didn't have the right marketing feel to it. Another way to think of it is "LINQ without using an API or Provider.". Other members of the LINQ family (LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities) always involve a library object to access a data store. LINQ to Objects doesn't. So you can also think of it as "LINQ to anything not in one of the other LINQ's". This article explains it.LINQ Queries - Deferred Queries
LINQ - Language Integrated Query - is the reason a whole host of new technolgies were introduced in VB.NET 2008. For example, Lamda expressions and partial methods. Another technology that was introduced with LINQ is the LINQ query ... a faster and more direct way to write LINQ query expressions. Most LINQ queries are "deferred". This article explains what "deferred" actually means.
LINQ and Queries
LINQ - Language Integrated Query - is the reason a whole host of new technolgies were introduced in VB.NET 2008. For example, Lamda expressions and partial methods. Another technology that was introduced with LINQ is the LINQ query ... a faster and more direct way to write LINQ query expressions. This article explains it.
AutoTest - A LINQ to XML Example Program
Microsoft's LINQ technology combined with XML can revolutionize the way you program, but it's difficult to make the transition from more traditional ways of programming to LINQ. Moving to XML can be a challenge too. A reader asked for help programming a system to generate random test questions. Since it seemed like an ideal way to showcase LINQ, I wrote most of the code as a programming example.LINQ to SQL in VB.NET
One way to classify the innovations introduced with LINQ - Language INtegrated Query - is by all of the datastores supported by Microsoft. One of the first datastores people want to use is SQL where the datastore is a SQL Server database. This article shows how to get started using database code that is a compiled part of your VB.NET program.LINQ to DataSet
Microsoft's LINQ (Language Integrated Query) technology is designed to work with any data store, but LINQ to SQL (introduced in a different Visual Basic About.com article) only works with SQL Server. To make LINQ work with the rest, LINQ to DataSet works with the rest. This article explains how to make that work.LINQ to Entities
Working with databases inside application code has always been a problem, mainly because there are lots of different databases (with different interface requirements) and because the data in databases just doesn't match the way data is represented in application code. One of the ways of dealing with this problem is to create a new way to represent the data that is application code friendly. That's the Entity Framework. Microsoft's LINQ (Language Integrated Query) technology is designed to work with any data store, so it also works with the Entity Framework. This article explains how.
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