Exploring .NET 3.x: LINQ, XLing, & Dling

[-Job-]

EDIT: I meant to post this in the Programming Forum, if a mod can please move it...

Have you heard of the LINQ project? I recently came across it.
Since .NET 3.x is going to support Lambda expressions, .NET developers will introduce LINQ (Langauge Integrated Query) which supports SQL-like statements for arrays and collections.
Along with it are coming XLing and Dling for creating classes which integrate seamlessly with an XML or Database schema respectively.
Here are some examples:

public void Linq6() {
    int[] numbers = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 };

    var numsPlusOne =
        from n in numbers
        select n + 1;
    
    Console.WriteLine("Numbers + 1:");
    foreach (var i in numsPlusOne) {
        Console.WriteLine(i);
    }
}

public void Linq88() { 
   List products = GetProductList();

   var categories = 
      from p in products 
      group p by p.Category into g 
      from maxPrice = g.Group.Max(p => p.UnitPrice) 
      select new {Category = g.Key, MostExpensiveProducts = g.Group.Where(p => p.UnitPrice == maxPrice)}; 

   ObjectDumper.Write(categories, 1); 
}

Some more examples at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/aa336747.aspx

The LINQ Project: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa904594.aspx

You can download a CTP version of Visual Studio Orcas (the next Visual Studio release), which includes .NET 3.5 and allows you to develop with LINQ.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...3d-5e79-4126-b4c0-8db6332de26e&displaylang=en

This is a new direction for OO languages and independently of whether it will be a success or a failure (personally i think it's a great idea) it's important to keep up with the times.

 

[Mark44]

Yes, LINQ seems very useful to me, although I don't have any database programming experience. It's still a part of Microsoft's .Net Framework (current version is 4.7.2 as of Apr 2019).

Updated LINQ Project link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/concepts/linq/index