LINQ to just about anything

I've just stumbled across a useful post on Microsoft's Data Team's blog. It's an elevator pitch of their strategy, and is perhaps the best and simplest explanation I've seen of what's coming down the pipe for data in .net 3.5. I'm particularly thinking about the alphabet soup of different LINQ implementations. I haven't touched Orcas at all, so it's not been very clear what all the various flavours of LINQ are all about; there seemed to be a lot of overlap. Simply seeing them listed together, along with a brief explanation of the Entity Framework's abstraction layer, makes everything click into place.

What is LINQ?

Microsoft’s new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that provide common capabilities within the programming language for querying against in-memory data as well as external data sources. LINQ complements our vision for an Entity Data Platform by providing language extensions for querying data as objects within the programming language.

LINQ will ship as part of the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, codenamed Orcas. At the time that Orcas first ships, the .NET Framework will include support for LINQ over in-memory objects, LINQ over XML (XLINQ), LINQ over ADO.NET DataSets (LINQ to DataSet), and LINQ queries directly mapped to Microsoft SQL Server schemas (LINQ to SQL).

A few months after the shipment of Orcas, and within the first half of 2008, Microsoft will release the ADO.NET Entity Framework as an extension to the Orcas version of the .NET Framework. The ADO.NET Entity Framework will fully support LINQ through a feature known as “LINQ to Entities”. LINQ to Entities combines the developer experience of having query integrated into the programming language and the richness of being able to define an Entity Data Model with flexible mapping to relational stores.

Of course, MIX07's announcement of Project Jasper adds another dimension to all of this. I'm still digesting that one.

Source: Data : Microsoft’s Data Access Strategy