Chapter 23. Introducing LINQ

Developers create applications that in most cases need to access data sources and manipulate data. During the years hundreds of different data sources and file formats saw the light, and each of them has its own specifications, requirements, and language syntaxes. Whenever an application requires accessing data from a database or parsing a structured file, in most cases manipulation commands are supplied as strings, making it difficult to reveal bugs at compile time. LINQ solves all these problems in one solution, changing how developers write code and improving productivity. This chapter provides an overview of this revolutionary technology that is reprised and discussed in detail in the next chapters.