Over the last few months I've written a series of blog posts that covered some of the new language features that are coming with the Visual Studio and .NET Framework Orcas release. Here are pointers to those posts:

• Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Lambda Expressions
• Query Syntax
• Anonymous Types

The language features above help make querying data a first-class programming concept. We call this overall querying programming model LINQ, which stands for .NET Language Integrated Query.