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As an up-to-date IT company, BACK Consulting has always had an eye on the continuing developments of Microsoft .NET technology. Members of the company have already done some experiments with the newest development environment: Visual Studio 2008. This comes with .NET 3.5 and an extremely new powerful data driven utility called LINQ (Language-Integrated Query). The pricipal of LINQ is to add "general purpose query facilities to the .NET Framework that apply to all sources of information, not just relational or XML data. It was intended to break the gap between the world of objects and the world of data. Developers can express efficient query behavior in their programming language of choice, optionally transform/shape data query results into whatever format they want and then easily manipulate the results. LINQ-enabled languages can provide full type-safety and compile-time checking of query expressions. Development tools can provide full intellisense, debugging and rich refactoring support when writing LINQ code. LINQ supports a very rich extensibility model that facilitates the creation of very efficient domain-specific operators for data sources.
Development has evolved from a classic client-server to various forms of three-tier architecture (DLL-hell, SOAP, etc.). The principal of these architectures is that the front-end addresses the required commands to the middle tier, the middle tier then talks to the database for getting required interests from the font-end. These types of system are based on how communication is desinged and implemented. The best scenario is that the front-end should do as little as possible, all the logic should be moved to the back end of the system. For this purpose LINQ fits in wonderfully. It makes the back end do what it should do; data.
LINQ provides a nice, clean way to model the data layer of your application. Once you've defined your data model you can easily and efficiently perform queries, inserts, updates and deletes against it. The "Orcas" version of the .NET Framework ships with built-in libraries that enable LINQ support against Objects, XML, and Databases. This is going to aid development on our client software projects as it performs an extended functionality set of Subsonic to cut out large amounts of repetitive coding. We look forward to letting you know how it goes. If you would like more information then please contact us.
Tuan Truong
Solutions Design Architect
Some useful links to get on with Linq
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397910.aspx Get started with Linq in Visual Basic
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/05/19/using-linq-to-sql-part-1.aspx Using LINQ to SQL