What is LINQ? How its related to VS2008?

LINQ is a series of language extensions that supports data querying in a type-safe way; it will be released with the next version Visual Studio, VS2008, code-named "Orcas."

The data to be queried can take the form of XML (LINQ to XML), databases (LINQ-enabled ADO.NET, which includes LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Dataset and LINQ to Entities), objects (LINQ to Objects) etc