LINQ: A New Syntactic Approach to Data Access

To begin, let’s address an issue that has certainly made the relatively new LINQ features in .NET harder to understand for the uninitiated: there is “brand confusion” around the name. That’s because LINQ, which is actually just a new language feature in C# and Visual Basic .NET, is typically (but not always) used against LINQ to SQL data models and Entity Framework data models (the latter of which are queried using LINQ to Entities). Therefore, many people initially associate LINQ with one of these two Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools.

LINQ to DataSet

To reiterate, however, LINQ itself is just a language feature and need not be used against models from either ORM tool. For example, LINQ can be used ...

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