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How beneficial is LINQ?

T

Train

Lifer
Ok so I "sorta" get the jist of LINQ, but havent used it or even seen it in action. To those of you that are more familiar with it... is it worthwhile to learn it versus using good old fashion recordsets returned from a DB using prepeared sql statements?

Does it decrease development time? What are the major benifits of learning it? Basically I want to know if it will actually help me code better/faster/more efficient vs just being a fad that has no real benefit.

BTW, nowadays I do most of my work in C#, both desktop and ASP.net, with a lot of XML files and XML services thrown in.
 
LINQ is no fad, but it is just another tool in the .Net programmers belt that can handle ORM (Object relational mapping). There are tons of frameworks that do this same task (NHibernate, LLBLGen, SubSonic etc.); however since it has the support of MS in Visual Studio it will surely catch on further and perhaps be the most popular ORM for .Net.

Using ORMs or Code Generators beats the pants off of using prepared SQL and writing code based on recordsets, as it will save you countless hours of writing monotonous code. If you have a Code Generation tool or ORM framework that you like, then you should perhaps stick with it as LINQ is not perfect, but as I said before it beats writing your own DAL code.
 
I'm used to working in .NET 2.0 but for this project I'm writing I am using the 3.5 framework. I've already written the DAL, BusinessObjects, and BusinessLogic layers but was thinking about implementing LINQ into a small part of the application just to see if it's easier.

Not sure how much re-writing I would have to do but it's something I may do in my own time apart from the project development time.
 
LINQ is just an ORM. It goes beyond the DB and allows "binding" to XML files, too. There is more to the notion than just "creating DALs" in the .NET 3.5 realm. The objects can be further manipulated precisely via what MS calls "Extension methods" and generic data structures. It is not a black box in the sense that you can force the use of stored procedures at the DB level than just 'trust' auto-generated code. I found XLINQ to be highly productive once you get the hang of it... I didn't have to spend as much time thinking about my XPath queries.

Just think of it as an extension of the Framework. Very powerful and nicely done.
 
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