Snow and LINQ

For those of you wondering where I’ve been – I’ve been on vacation for the last 10 days, skiing and snowboarding. Although slightly of topic for this blog I just have to share one of the pictures we took with you, to give you an idea of the wonderful snow and weather we had. And yes, that’s me in the midst of that snow. And no, I’m not about to fall, we just had alot of snow.

For those who know me, you know I like to bring some litterature along on my vacations to catch up on some topic of interest. This time that topic was LINQ and the reading was the free ebook from Microsoft press: Introducing Microsoft LINQ. Go here for details about the book and the free ebook offer. I’ve listened in on presentation about LINQ before, but not lately, and they have never gone deeper than to show the grace of the syntax, and talk about why LINQ was developed and what you can do with it. The ebook also talks about the language syntax and background, but goes into more detail about the .NET language features that enables LINQ, and their history and evolution. Good stuff.

Of the different aspects I’ve learned about LINQ I most like the idea of LINQ as a SOA enabler, rather than a simple data access language. Being able to do join, where, etc. on data returned from different Services being called in parallell, all wrapped up in a simple functional statement. That’s where LINQ really becomes useful.