How to: Visual Basic .NET LINQ Hands on lab for Visual Studio 2008 (FREE)

LINQ is one of the newest, and most exciting (IMHO), features in the .NET Framework 3.5 (Visual Studio 2008).  In short, it's a feature that allows you to treat Objects, SQL Data Sources, XML, etc. with the same Query Language (SQL-Like).  For example, one of the things that I as a developer hate having to do, is work with the XML Objects in order to transverse/lookup XML Data from an XML file.  Typically, if the file is small enough, I will convert it to a DataSet and then use SQL Queries to manipulate/Search the file.  The big problem there is that there is a major overhead if the file is large, or if I only need the data for brief periods of time (i.e., constructing and tearing-down the ADO.NET Dataset structure).  With LINQ, I can access the XML DOM with SQL-Like statements without having to load the whole thing in memory like a Dataset, no matter what the size of the file is.  Anyway, that's one of the reasons that I think that LINQ is a very nice new feature.

Here's the description of the HOL:

These Visual Basic LINQ Hands-on Labs provide an introduction to the LINQ Project. Learn basic LINQ features, including the Standard Query Operators, and see how these features can be used against in-memory collections, connected databases, and XML documents. The labs also provide a clear picture of the relational data access support provided by the LINQ Project, referred to as LINQ to SQL.
The language integrated query framework for .NET (codenamed “LINQ”) is a set of language extensions to C# and Visual Basic and a unified programming model that extends the .NET Framework to offer integrated querying for objects, databases and XML.

Here's the download for the labs: ( Click here )

~ Robert Shelton