Chapter 13. LINQ in every layer
This chapter covers:
- The LinqBooks application
- N-tier architecture
- Third-party LINQ providers
- The future of LINQ
Congratulations! You’ve reached the last chapter of this book. You should now have a good grasp of LINQ’s capabilities and should now be able to put the skills you’ve acquired into practice in your projects. There is still one last subject we’d like to cover: the place of LINQ in your applications.
As you know, LINQ is not only a generic querying technology but a complete set of tools you can use to deal with relational databases, XML, DataSets, in-memory object collections, and many more data sources thanks to LINQ’s extensibility. This means that from now on, LINQ is likely to become pervasive in your code.
In this chapter, we will look at a sample application we’ve created using LINQ. This application is the LinqBooks running example that we introduced in chapter 4 and that we used over this book’s chapters as the base for the code samples. You’ll be able to find the complete source code in the downloadable package that accompanies this book. By looking at the LinqBooks sample, you’ll be able to identify where and how each LINQ flavor is used. Our goal is to help you decide whether you need to use LINQ in your application layers, as well as see what impact it can have on your applications’ architecture.