Jim,

>Obviously only sketchy information in the artice (UT main page reference).
>
>http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1858828,00.asp?kc=CZRSS03129TX1K0000612

Yes, that's it. LINQ (the Language Integrated Query Framework) is a language-neutral query engine (which may or may not have come from the internals of the Fox engine -- I don't know all the details yet, but have heard lots of rumors). You can specify to the query engine your select statements, where and orderby and group by clauses, and so forth, either through talking directly to the query framework and setting properties, etc, or by language extensions that do that automatically for you.

Out of the box it will talk to (query into) any .NET collections with a certain interface (IEnumerable, I think) as well as databases and XML documents. Because a query done this way will result in a collection, you can then use SQL commands to further 'drill down" into that first result set, much as we can do today with Fox cursors.

The other big part of the picture involves the various enhancements to C# and VB to support automatically talking to the LINQ through integrating data syntax into the language. The VB.NET implementation, from what I have seen and read so far, looks like it will be much closer to a standard SQL syntax (thus more Fox-like) than the C# approach.

There are lots of links out there already, but here is a blog entry that points to lots of VB LINQ links so you can see how VB talks to the LINQ.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brad_mccabe/archive/2005/09/14/466180.aspx