Microsoft recently unveiled their future plans for the C# language. C# 3.0, which will ship with the next version of Visual Studio (codename 'Orcas'), will offer new features which work in concert to offer a better solution to one of today's pain points: dealing with data from relational databases and XML documents.

These new language features work hand in hand with the 'LINQ'
(Language INtegrated Query) specification. However, the C# design philosophy has always been one of generality rather than task-specific expediency, so while the new C# 3.0 features all help LINQ, they have been designed to be much more broadly applicable.

In this session Ian Griffiths will describe the new C# 3.0 language features, show how they contribute to LINQ, and take a broader look of what they bring to the language.