What is a Feature? The term Feature represents a functional component that can be activated in SharePoint.

A Feature provides the following:

1. New Functionality 2. Site Customizations

For example, the Document ID Feature provides new Document Management functionalities to SharePoint. We can also create our own features and deploy to the customer site.

LINQ to SharePoint is a new feature of SharePoint 2010. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query which is a part of the .NET Language. The purpose of LINQ is to support various data sources using the same Typed Query Syntax. Presently it supports Objects, Datasets, SQL, Entities, XML etc. Why we need LINQ? You might have noted that the previous List Programming examples did not use proper column name access. LINQ allows us to access the List in a Typed manner. Adding more clarity, we can access the list items based on the column names which we usually do with the databases. Example: var result = from c in Citizen where c.Name == "John" select c; Sp Metal: creating custom lists having custom column names, we need to generate the Entity Model. The SPMetal.exe is the tool which helps in generating the Model classes. Although we can create the Model classes manually, it will be a tedious job and prone to error. Using SPMetal would be the right approach to model classes.