Summary

In this chapter, you’ve seen the future of C#. C# continues to grow. With C# 2.0 the major new feature was generics, which provide the foundation for generic type-safe collection classes, as well as generic interfaces and delegates. The major feature of C# 3.0 becomes LINQ. You can use a syntax that is integrated with the language to query any data source, as long there’s a provider for the data source.

You’ve seen C# 3.0 language extensions, such as object and collection initializers, which offer a new syntax for initializing objects and lists; type inference with the var keyword; and extension methods. LINQ offers many extension methods to filter and sort data sources.

Lambda expressions are an important concept that is based on either delegates or expression trees.

Query expressions make use of all the new language extensions to integrate a query syntax directly into the programming language.