Part 3. C# 3: Revolutionizing data access

There’s no doubt that C# 2 is a significant improvement over C# 1. The benefits of generics, in particular, are fundamental to other changes, not just in C# 2 but also in C# 3. But C# 2 is in some sense a piecemeal collection of features. Don’t get me wrong: they fit together nicely enough, but they address a set of individual issues. That was appropriate at that stage of C#’s development, but C# 3 is different.

Almost every feature in C# 3 enables one specific technology: LINQ. Many of the features are useful outside this context, and you certainly shouldn’t confine yourself to only using them when you happen to be writing a query expression, but it’d be equally silly not to recognize the complete picture created by the set of jigsaw puzzle pieces presented in the following five chapters.

When I originally wrote about C# 3 and LINQ in 2007, I was highly impressed on a somewhat academic level. The more deeply you study the language, the more clearly you see the harmony between the various elements that have been introduced. The elegance of query expressions—and in particular the ability to use the same syntax for both in-process queries and providers like LINQ to SQL—was very appealing. LINQ had a great deal of promise.