I am creating an application extension for a software package call ESRI ArcGIS Desktop in .NET 4 and WPF. It will rely tabular data but I would like the storage options for this data be as flexible as possible. So the user can pull in things like Access mdbs, csv, xml, SQL Server, etc.
I would like to use LINQ but being new to it I am having trouble figuring out if it suitable. From what I read an EDMX is out which is fine but was not sure if LINQ will really work well without one. I was reading about the IQueryable which seems like it might work. But before I spend too long spinning my wheels I wanted to see if I am barking up the wrong tree.
Should I look further into something like IQueryable or am I making it overly complicated and can use something like IEnumrable, List, or Dictionaries, etc and LINQ should be fine with those? Or will this work at all?
You can use LINQ to Objects with any IEnumerable<T>. If you're working against ArcObjects, it's unlikely that any data source will be directly usable, however, as their "collections" aren't .NET collections.
You can easily wrap them in your own IEnumerable<T> wrapper, and then use LINQ to Objects against them.