LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Amazon, LINQ to Coffee Machine ...

At "Meet the LINQ Team" session at TechEd, I got a few questions about LINQ to SQL and if it was possible to build a similar implementation. The answer is - absolutely you can. Take the soon-to-be released expression tree API documents, a few samples on the net and start cooking. What can you build a LINQ provider for? Any source of data worth querying. Who knows, it could be a smart fridge which tells you about the contents and perhaps down the road - your coffee machine.

 The complexity of a provider depends on:
1. What set of query operators you choose to implement; and
2. Difference between the query operators and the target query language or API; and
3. Level of optimization or tuning you want to do; and finally
4. Availability of samples (yes, you guessed right. Our team members are working on this one in addition to the community at large)

Coffee machine aside, there are many providers already available. Most are based on May 2006 LINQ CTP but most can be upgraded to .NET Framework 3.5 without too much effort. Charlie's blog post and Oakleaf systems blog post have good starter lists.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 12, 2007
  Thanks for the great Q&A at TechEd! I am really looking forward to the release of the Expression Tree documentation.  Do you have a date yet?

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2007
  Welcome to the XXVIII Community Convergence. In these posts I try to wrap up events that have occurred

• Anonymous
  July 26, 2007
  Seems great, could make a provider for websites, like select newdoc from msdn, haha or select images from aGoogleSearch how cool could this world be?

• Anonymous
  August 03, 2007
  LINQ to SharePoint, targeting CAML-based queries, is another one that might be interesting. Check it out on http://www.codeplex.com/LINQtoSharePoint. -Bart

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  The comment has been removed