"Charlie and Dinesh bring important skills to this project that enable them to show how LINQ works and the practical ways you can use it in your daily development process." From the Foreword by Anders Hejlsberg LINQ is one of Microsoft's most exciting, powerful new development technologies. Essential LINQ is the first LINQ book written by leading members of Microsoft's LINQ and C# teams. Writing for architects, developers, and development managers, these Microsoft insiders share their intimate understanding of LINQ, revealing new patterns and best practices for getting the most out of it. Calvert and Kulkarni begin by clearly explaining how LINQ resolves the long-time "impedance mismatch" between object-oriented code and relational databases. Next, they show how LINQ integrates querying into C# as a "first-class citizen." Using realistic code examples, they show how LINQ provides a strongly typed, IntelliSense-aware technology for working with data from any source, including SQL databases, XML files, and generic data structures. Calvert and Kulkarni carefully explain LINQ's transformative, composable, and declarative capabilities. By fully illuminating these three concepts, the authors allow developers to discover LINQ's full power. In addition to covering core concepts and hands-on LINQ development in C# with LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to Entities, they also present advanced topics and new LINQ implementations developed by the LINQ community. This book * Explains the entire lifecycle of a LINQ project: design, development, debugging, and much more * Teaches LINQ from both a practical and theoretical perspective * Leverages C# language features that simplify LINQ development * Offers developers powerful LINQ query expressions to perform virtually any data-related task * Teaches how to query SQL databases for objects and how to modify those objects * Demonstrates effective use stored procedures and database functions with LINQ * Shows how to add business logic that reflects the specific requirements of your organization * Teaches developers to create, query, and transform XML data with LINQ * Shows how to transform object, relational, and XML data between each other * Offers best patterns and practices for writing robust, easy-to-maintain LINQ code