How to implement search functionality in C#/ASP.NET MVC

Question

I am developing an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using C# and Razor.

I have a search form that looks like this:

Answer 1

We started out resolving similar queries against our Entity Framework model using dynamic linq queries. However, our attempts to generalize query generation resulted in bad performance due to EF being confused by the resulting complex expressions, so in the end horrible SQL was produced.

We resorted to Entity SQL.