Scott Guthrie has announced that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 are now available for download and provides a tour of some of the new features. "Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 contain a ton of new functionality and improvements. Below are links to blog posts I've done myself as well as links to videos you can watch to learn more about it."
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Member since:2006-07-04
Agreed.
And besides "LING to SQL" and "LINQ to XML", Microsoft has also created LINQ to Objects, which gives LINQ the ability to query any collection or object that implements IEnumerable. And there are already third party LINQ providers specializing in querying particular data (web queries, RSS feeds, etc).
And of course, there's PLINQ (Parallel LINQ) that automatically runs queries on multiple cores/cpus.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/PLINQ/default.aspx
LINQ rocks. 
Member since:2007-07-13
May I ask the question as to whether LINQ has a syntax that is the same across all database back-ends or is it specific to the database in question? If it is specific to a particular database then that sux from a migration point of view (which happens in the real world). I've just completed a government Postgresql to Oracle project and the database specific SQL in JDBC sux. They should have used Hibernate which has the same syntax no matter what the target is.
Member since:
2006-04-10
LINQ info:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa904594.aspx
"It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities"
Microsoft already created the providers "LINQ to SQL", "LINQ to XML" + more.
You can create any provider you want, see an example here http://blogs.msdn.com/hartmutm/default.aspx "A LINQ provider for RDF files".
LINQ != activerecord.