LINQPad – Query, interactively, SQL Databases with LINQ

LINQPad it’s a tool from Joseph Albahari ( the author of C# 3.0 in a nutshell ) that interactively query SQL Databases with the new query language LINQ.

LINQPad supports LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Objects and LINQ to XML. This tool is also a great method to learn LINQ because it comes preloaded with 200 examples from his book. It’s also a code snippet IDE that instantly execute any C#3.0 or VB9.0 expression or statement block.

LINQPad it’s free and needs no installation. It requires .NET Framework 3.5 and supports SQL Express, SQL 2000, SQL 2005 and (with some limitations) SQL 2008.

Official page of LINQPad

101 LINQ Samples

.NET Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) adds query capabilities to the CLR and the languages that target it. The query facility builds on lambda expressions and expression trees to allow predicates, projections, and key extraction expressions to be used as opaque executable code or as transparent in-memory data suitable for downstream processing or translation. The standard query operators defined by the LINQ project work over any IEnumerable<T>-based information source, and are integrated with ADO.NET (LINQ to SQL) and System.Xml (LINQ to XML) to allow relational and XML data to gain the benefits of language-integrated query.

[ from LINQ: .NET Language-Integrated Query ]

MSDN provides a page where you can find LINQ samples: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/aa336746.aspx