Visual Studio IDE and Tools Support for LINQ
The Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) provides the following features that support LINQ application development:
Object Relational Designer
The Object Relational Designer is a visual design tool that you can use in LINQ to SQL applications to generate classes in C# or Visual Basic that represent the relational data in an underlying database. For more information, see Object Relational Designer (O/R Designer).
SQLMetal Command Line Tool
SQLMetal is a command-line tool that can be used in build processes to generate classes from existing databases for use in LINQ to SQL applications. For more information, see SqlMetal.exe (Code Generation Tool).
LINQ-Aware Code Editors
Both the C# and Visual Basic code editors support LINQ extensively with IntelliSense and formatting capabilities.
Visual Studio Debugger Support
The Visual Studio debugger supports debugging of query expressions. For more information, see Debugging LINQ.