What is Language INtegrated Query?
Many of the past .NET Nuts & Bolts columns, even all the way back to some of my first articles such as Database Independent Data Access, have had something to do with accessing and manipulating data. Commonly, data is stored in a database, but there are many other forms of accessing and manipulating data as well such as data files, event logs, the Registry, and so forth. Querying and manipulating data is a common part of many applications. LINQ (often overheard pronounced as “link”) is a step in the evolution of data access. It is a programming model that brings a much needed uniformity to accessing data from files, XML, database, registry, event log, and a whole host of other sources of data such as Active Directory and even services from 3rd parties such as Flickr. It is designed to work with all shapes and sizes of different data and allow you to perform Query, Set, and Transform operations on all of it. Pretty much anything that implements IEnumerable is a target for LINQ.
