Database-centric applications have traditionally had to rely on two distinct programming languages: one for the database and one for the application. In this session we will introduce LINQ to SQL, a component of the LINQ project designed to help integrate relational data and queries with C# and Visual Basic.

LINQ to SQL enables developers to express queries and updates against the SQL Server family of databases in terms of their local programming language without sacrificing the server-side execution model of today's high-performance SQL-based approaches.

Using these advances, database queries that previously were stored as opaque strings now benefit from static type checking, CLR metadata, design-time type inference, and of course IntelliSense.

LINQ to SQL also supports a rich update capability that lets you save changes to an object graph back to the database using optimistic concurrency or transactions.