On Liking LINQ

This past Sunday marked Veteran's Day on the calendar. I observed the holiday in true patriotic fashion: by working.

Truthfully, I spent the day working through the LINQ hands-on lab. You can find all the links you'd need to get started with LINQ and the VS2008 Beta2 release at Charlie Calvert's blog.

First Impressions

It didn't take me long to get used to the new syntax, though I think my experience with JavaScript and Erlang might account for that. I absolutely love the inclusion of lamda expressions; these are huge syntax improvement over writing delegates today in-line today. The extension methods provide a uniformity across the various "LINQ to" APIs that make moving from one type of data source to another very easy. I was pleased that it was so easy to see the SQL output of LINQ to SQL, and I pleasantly suprised that code generated by the designer for LINQ to Objects was so readable and well organized.

I will update this post with more comments later.