I am working on an application that involves integrating SharePoint data with Outlook & Excel. I love LINQ and wondered if someone happened to already produced some LINQ to SharePoint tools. A quick search found a great tool built by Bart De Smet. His tool is a available at CodePlex. Here is a summary of the features (straight from the CodePlex site):
- Custom query provider that translates LINQ queries to CAML, the Collaborative Application Markup Language used by SharePoint for querying.
- Support for LINQ in C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0.
- Entity creation tool SpMetal to export SharePoint list definitions to entity classes used for querying.
- Visual Studio 2008 integration for entity creation (a.k.a. SPML).
- Can connect to a SharePoint site either using the SharePoint object model or via the SharePoint web services.
- Planned support for updating through entity types.
Setup was involved running an .msi file and it worked flawlessly. After a bit of trouble related to Lookup fields in SharePoint, I was able to add a LinqToSharePoint class to my VSTO project, choose the desired lists from my site, and create the LINQ class.
Regarding the trouble with Lookup fields, all I can say is if you select a list that has lookup fields, be sure to choose the list(s) that contain the lookup values.