ASP.NET dynamic data featured a new way to develop applications, especially for the UI. The templating feature sets up a new way to render the UI, whether in display or edit mode, based the object to display’s data type. For instance, if you wanted to render a LINQ object in dynamic data, the framework extracts information about all of the properties, looks up the template to for the data type of that property (an in-built user control or possibly a custom template you setup), and renders this UI for that property of a given type.
This feature is now in the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 framework, for .NET framework 3.5 and 4.0. We are going to take a look at these features.

var temp = from sc in ServiceController.GetServices()
where sc.ServiceName == "MyService"
select sc;
// temp.Count() is 0 if the service is not installed
Boolean isInstalled = temp.Count() != 0;

If you want to manipulate the service (if installed, obviously), you don’t need to instantiate a new ServiceController(servicename), as the LINQ query returned a ServiceController ready to go. Add the following lines to the example:

if (isInstalled)
{
    ServiceController myController =
        // the LINQ query only returns one element - we can use First<>()
        temp.First();
    Console.WriteLine("Service is installed and " +
        myController.Status.ToString());
    if (myController.Status == ServiceControllerStatus.Stopped)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Starting the service...");
        myController.Start();
    }
}
else
{
    Console.WriteLine("The service is not installed");
}

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You can change this LINQ query to search for any of the ServiceController’s properties. The following example returns the list of all started services:

// Get all installed services
var startedServices = from sc in ServiceController.GetServices()
    where sc.Status == ServiceControllerStatus.Running
    select sc;
Console.WriteLine("And the installed services are:");
// now lets iterate thru all the started services
foreach (ServiceController startedService
    in startedServices.ToList())
{
    Console.WriteLine("  " + startedService.ServiceName +
        ": " + startedService.DisplayName);
}

The major (and only) drawback when using LINQ is that it’s only available in .net framework 3.5.

For more on LINQ see also: ScottGu’s introduction to LINQ (focused on SQL LINQ), Introducing Microsoft LINQ, LINQ Pocket Reference, Language Integrated Query in C#2008, Programming Microsoft LINQ or the LINQ page in Wikipedia.