So in my LINQ code, rather than using an explicit Join to attach the Customer to the Orders table, I can query the Orders collection and retrieve the Customer information through the Orders navigation ...

That SQL statement would reflect both LINQ queries. That leads to another way of "thinking in LINQ": If you feel your code is easier to read or maintain by having separate LINQ queries, don't hesitate ...

Then, I can write a LINQ query to get the values easily enough, but I want the numerical representation of the values, so I am using the Parse method (s).