One of the main issues currently facing developers industry-wide is the difficulty of creating data-rich applications, a difficulty that arises from the tremendous differences between query languages used to access data and programming languages commonly used to write applications. A quick browse through the computer programming section of any bookstore provides evidence of this issue. Books are divided into sections that address different types of programming, such as XML, database and object programming, revealing a world of distinct domains. Developers writing applications that access data from relational (SQL) or hierarchical (XML) data sources must be adept at traversing very different language syntaxes to get the job done.

To reduce complexity for developers and help boost their productivity, Microsoft today announced a solution for the .NET Framework called the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Project, a set of language extensions to the C# and Visual Basic programming languages that extends the Microsoft .NET Framework by providing integrated querying for objects, databases and XML data. Using LINQ, developers will be able to write queries natively in C# or Visual Basic without having to use other languages, such as Structured Query Language (SQL) or XQuery, a query language for accessing XML data. The announcement was made here at the Microsoft Professional Developers 2005 Conference, where Microsoft is making available a Tech Preview containing pre-release versions of the various components of the LINQ Project.