LINQ is welcome news indeed for .NET. I've been looking at some of the information that is begining to make its way onto the net, including a number of examples that are being posted. The ability to use SQL to gather and interrogate various classes and data sources (XML for instance) could lead to some really cool solutions.

It piqued my interest enough that I started playing around with the concept in Visual FoxPro. You can look at what I came up with at the following permalink:

http://www.sweetpotatosoftware.com/SPSBlog/PermaLink,guid,8f61649c-c076-4420-b949-07ae7b32ac54.aspx

...it's a cool concept, and definitely revolutionary for VB. I'm wondering whether it will be available for office automation as well. That would be pretty cool.

>I haven't been to this site in quite a while, since I'm now doing .NET almost exclusively. It's tough to see most of the familiar names gone and especially to hear about Randy Brown's move today (we still haven't had the chance to ski Taos together). One of my pet peeves about .NET has always been that it's horribly cumbersome to work with data -FoxPro has forever spoiled me-, so this article caught my attention. It's still years off, but when it happens, it will finally catch .NET up to what we've all had available to us for years <g>.
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>Mike
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>From the Fawcette Technical Publications today
> (http://www.ftponline.com/channels/net/reports/pdc/2005/gates/)
>
>Language Integrated Query
>(LINQ)
>The LINQ Project provides native language (C# was displayed) support for creating query-based logic on any data source. LINQ provides language support to treat any .NET collection as a relational table: You can query arrays, lists, or other collections. It includes support for sorting, filtering, and retrieval of just selected fields.
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>It also provides tools for you to link data sources from multiple locations. You can quickly write logic that merges in-memory data with external database sources. Finally, you can add XML support to the source data and the merged data to produce new XML output. Anders Hejlsberg and Don Box did a quick demo of this project to create an RSS feed that displayed information about all the running processes on your computer. All the plumbing (data connections, sort, query, filter, and join) is done for you. You get to concentrate on your specific tasks: what you do with that data.