Interested in LINQ?

I'm sure you've heard about LINQ, but just in case you haven't, it stands for Language Integrated Query.  I just finished a 60-page overview of LINQ, which is available as a PDF from O'Reilly:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/language1/?CMP=ILC-2RQ886833906&ATT=language1

The PDF represents the first in a 3-part series on LINQ; part 2 will focus specifically on LINQ for SQL, and part 3 will focus on LINQ for XML. Along with the PDFs I'll be presenting a series of MSDN webcasts on LINQ; I'll let you know when the live presentation dates become official. 

LINQ offers SQL-like query support in C# and VB, allowing you to write queries --- against objects, XML documents, relational databases, and more --- with IntelliSense and strict type-checking.  For example, given a set of Doctor objects, here's a query to select all the doctors living in Chicago:

var chicago = from d in doctors where d.City == “Chicago“ select d;

There's a CTP (May 2006) you can download in order to play with LINQ [1]. The technology is slated to appear sometime in 2007 with the 3.next release of .NET (i.e. the release to *follow* the upcoming 3.0 release). It's very interesting technology, I encourge you to learn about LINQ if you haven't already. Cheers!

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/ref/linq/