of Contents 16: Ten LINQ Resources 335 in C#

Creation Code 3 of 9 in C# of Contents 16: Ten LINQ Resources 335

Starting with the Microsoft Developer Network 336 Getting Tips from the Microsoft Blogs 338 Finding Help in Third-Party Web Sites 339 Finding Help in Third-Party Newsletters and Blogs 340 Using Other Sources for LINQ to Objects Projects 342 Using Other Sources for LINQ to SQL Server Projects 342 Using Other Sources for LINQ to XML Projects 343 Considering Other LINQ to Sources Projects 344 Getting Help with Visual Basic Projects 345 Getting Help with C# Projects 346

anguage INtegrated Query (LINQ) sounds like some kind of formless question that depends on how someone speaks Of course, your queries are integrated with your language! How can you make them otherwise LINQ is actually a new feature of NET Framework that expands your grasp well beyond things Microsoft In fact, after playing with LINQ for quite some time I thought I d start to run out of new data sources to query, but it hasn t happened yet You can use LINQ to query just about anything (and I only say just about because I m sure there is something LINQ can t reach) The thing that should excite you most about LINQ is that it helps you access technologies that you couldn t ordinarily access or couldn t do so with ease For example, you can use LINQ to access MySQL easily, without considering a workaround You can also access Resource Description Framework (RDF) files, something that would be tough without LINQ You get all of these additional opportunities to access varied data sources and you ll write less code, not more, to do it LINQ is truly one of the most interesting features that Microsoft has ever added to NET Framework, and you d miss out on a lot if you didn t explore the LINQ technology for your own programming needs

LINQ For Dummies is your gateway to a new world one in which you can ask questions (programmatically) of literally anything This book starts with the basics You need to discover the LINQ basics before you can begin pulling information from Active Directory, but LINQ is so small compared to many technologies that the basics require only a few pages Most of this book is about getting serious work accomplished After working with LINQ for a while, I discovered that there are inequities in the LINQ world For one thing, it seems as if Microsoft is avoiding Visual Basic NET because their Web site has a decided lack of Visual Basic NET materials It was hard to find Visual Basic NET examples on third-party Web sites too I hope that this situation will change, but for now you have 4, which tells you the Visual Basic NET side of the story, and 16, which provides you with a host of Visual Basic NET resources The second inequity that LINQ For Dummies addresses is the needs of the Visual Studio 2005 developer It appears that everyone assumes you have Visual Studio 2008 Although most of this book was written with Visual Studio

2008 in mind, there isn t any reason you can t write LINQ applications using Visual Studio 2005, and 5 provides the information you need The remaining examples in the book will even work with Visual Studio 2005 with a little tweaking You ll also find a host of example types in LINQ For Dummies For example, did you know that you can access the content of Office 2007 documents using LINQ 10 tells you about all of the interesting things you can do with Office 2007 once you have LINQ at your disposal The astonishing thing is that you can perform these tasks with little code Using LINQ, it s possible to both read and write Office 2007 documents without resorting to odd programming strategies LINQ can also make your life as a developer considerably easier 14 provides an array of interesting techniques you can use to obtain information about your applications that you might not have even thought available Only in LINQ For Dummies can you find all of these mind-boggling techniques in one place