Circular references in classes/collections

[balabaster]

I have a database with two main tables, we'll call them A and B. The relationship between the two main tables is by nature a many-to-many relationship, so to normalize and avoid the many-to-many relationship, I've got a third table that joins relevant records of table A to table B, we'll call this one c.

So here I get to the tricky part and I wondered how most people got around this. I've got 2 classes in my project, one to represent table A and the other to represent table B. Each class has a collection which is filled with related items of the other class, as defined by table c.

When I populate the collections with data, how do I avoid the circular reference that is caused by the many-to-many nature of the relationship?

I wondered what techniques others use. I know that in Visual Studio 2008 we now have something called Yield Return which in effect returns a placeholder, but in .Net 2.0 we don't seem to have anything like this.

Is there a way of telling the system that we don't need to run off and get the items in this collection until the collection itself is referenced?

[balabaster]

I'm still stuck on this and wondered if anyone has any thoughts...