What is LINQ? How is it used in SharePoint?

LINQ is a feature of the C# 3.0 and Visual Basic.NET programming languages. LINQ enables object-oriented querying, supports compile-time checks, provides IntelliSense support in Visual Studio, and specifies a uniform, SQL-like vocabulary for querying any data source. LINQ, on the other hand, may query any data source, unlike other languages and query syntaxes that differ depending on the kind of data source. As a result, developers could discover that it’s the only query syntax they’ll ever need to master. Objects, collections, XML, and SQL server data sources are all routinely queried using it.

With the 2010 release, LINQ to SharePoint is now officially supported. It’s comparable to LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entity in how it works.

The Microsoft.SharePoint package contains the LINQ to SharePoint Provider.

Namespace for Linq. It converts LINQ queries into queries written in the Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML). Microsoft SharePoint is the LINQ to SharePoint provider’s gateway class. Linq. A SharePoint Foundation website’s data is represented by a DataContext.

The term LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and it is pronounced as LINK. Language Integrated Query means it is a part of a language but not a complete language. The LINQ was introduced by Microsoft with .NET Framework 3.5 and C# 3.0 and is available in System. Linq namespace.

LINQ provides us common query syntax which allows us to query the data from various data sources. That means using a single query we can get or set the data from various data sources such as SQL Server database, XML documents, Datasets, and any other in memory objects such as Collections, Generics, etc.