Integrated Query Next on VB, C# Roadmaps

The next versions of C# and Visual Basic (VB), Microsoft’s most popular programming languages among corporate developers, will include new syntax for querying data such as XML and relational databases. The new capability, known as Language Integrated Query (LINQ), was announced at the Sept. 2005 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and is due as part of the 2007 release of Visual Studio (code-named Orcas). Although it has very little immediate impact on developers, LINQ could eventually make it easier to create applications that access data and give VB developers another reason to move from the aging VB6 platform to .NET.

Adding Queries to VB and C#

Applications that access data, particularly data stored in relational database management systems (DBMSs), often contain important logic that isn’t expressed in the programming language but is instead represented as plain text (usually in quotation marks). For example, when a program queries a database to retrieve a list of customers living in a particular zip code, their account balances, and a detailed list of purchases, ordered from highest sales to lowest, it isn’t using any of the traditional features of programming languages, such as IF and WHILE statements. Instead it assembles a database query as plain text (e.g., “SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE ZipCode = ‘20212’”) and sends that statement to the DBMS. With LINQ, developers could express this kind of query logic directly in the programming language.