What is Microsoft LINQ all about?

LINQ is the short form for Language Integrated Query. In other words, LINQ is an integral part of the Visual Basic programming language that allows the programmer to perform queries and do other operations on the data sources. One of the many types of these data sources is the XML code. The user defined tags of the XML code are used as fields of database. For example, if a user enters a movie title, then a query is performed and it is formatted into LINQ. This formatted query then seeks the movie by matching the given title and returns the name of the actors from the matching movie title.

LINQ is an important component of the Microsoft .NET framework. This adds querying capacities to the various .NET programming languages. Microsoft LINQ has a set of method definitions and names. These are known as the Standard Sequence Operators or Standard Query Operators. Besides, LINQ also maintains a set of translation rules which range from the query expressions to expressions like lambda, method names and the anonymous types. These are very useful. For example, these can be used for projecting data and filtering them in enumerable class, arrays, XLINQ or XML, third party data sources and relational database.

The Query Expressions also prove very useful in rendering the arbitrary computations readable and constructing the monadic parsers or event handlers. Microsoft released LINQ on November 19, 2007 as an integral part of the .NET Framework 3.5. Many of LINQ’s new concepts were first tested in the C? research project of Microsoft. To sum it up all, LINQ or Language Integrated Query has proved to be very handy as retrieving data has become much easier, be it from XML, collections or databases. Thanks to its in-built tools! It has proved to be greatly time saving especially for the XML. One big example is the search feed which is used by Twitter.