Peter Vogel introduces a new column on application development in the real world, and begins by advocating for Language Integrated Query. Welcome to Practical .NET, a new column offering how-to ...

You have a method like this that returns a collection of premium Customer objects: Public Function GetPremiumCustomers() As List(of Customer) Dim db As New dbContextObject Return From c In ...

LINQ with Entity Framework has become so common that, when I'm looking at a client's code I'm finding some pretty scary-looking LINQ queries running against Entity Framework. Since I'm a big fan of ...

If you start "thinking in LINQ" you'll get more done with less code, and what you write will be simpler than using SQL. Switching to LINQ and the Entity Framework (EF) means that code you'll write for ...

It also introduces Language-Integrated Query, a generic way to query all kinds of data in C# and Visual Basic, and full support for Windows Vista, Silverlight, and Windows Presentation Foundation.

As I was testing the LINQ to SQL functionality in Visual Studio 2008, I found myself missing the SQL Query Builder. For the relatively simple three-table inner join SELECT queries I needed, I was able ...

So I'm playing around with Visual Studio 2010 while we think about moving our projects to it, and I was trying to make a new Silverlight 4 app, but when I go to add any kind of of data models (ADO, ...