NET that provides a run-time infrastructure
for mapping relational data as objects. This chapter provides an overview of LINQ to SQL, and the
rest of the chapters in this section of the book then dig deeper into the individual aspects of LINQ
to SQL, including LINQ to SQL queries and LINQ over DataSets.
Today??™s developers have access to many great technologies that afford management and
manipulation of database objects as well as data-querying capabilities. The .NET Framework
provides ADO.NET, a platform for accessing data sources such as XML (via the System.XML
namespace, which supplies a programmatic representation of XML documents and mechanisms for
manipulating XML documents, nodes, and XML fragments) and SQL Server (via the System.Data
namespace, which offers the primary data access methods for managed applications) as well as
other data sources exposed through ODBC and OLE DB.
Yet, all this great technology has its limitations, such as sometimes being overly complex (for
example, OLE DB is COM based and therefore does not work in the object-oriented paradigm, and
it also requires quite a bit of code to address data access functionality).
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