Craig,

>I don't think it came from the "internals" of the Fox engine. MS looked at how easily Fox integrates data and code and took that idea and ran with it...

Could be. I'll keep trying to find out more about what's under the hood of LINQ.

>... Based on the small demos I've seen here, I think LINQ is in someways inferior to what VFP does and in others it is superior.

Looking at it from the C# perspective and also from the high-level abstract and scholarly-sounding discussions of "Lambda" expressions, query comprehensions, and so forth, it's not immediately clear how it all will relate in a business sense to what Fox can do.

However, I think there is a lot here to look carefully at, particularly when you look closer at the VB syntax, which is much more like "real" SQL statements and less brain-dead-looking than the C# approach (putting the Select part of the statement at the end)... duh. VB will allow a lot more shortcuts than the C# syntax, I think.

I'm very interested to see what they do with perhaps allowing joins across various collections, arrays, XML docs and data pulled from a remote database. I'm also looking for clues to the hinted-at auto-spanning to disk of the in-memory data (think VFP cursors) and whether they will risk (from a marketing perspective) writing permanently to disk in anything other than SQL Server (think direct to disk local DBF-like representations of data that don't have to go through ODBC or OLE-DB). Somehow, I don't think they'll do the last one, although it would make immense sense in some cases. :-)

BE SURE to see Paul Vick's VB Thursday session -- you'll see a lot to like about the VB.NET approach, compared to C#.