>>Sadly the thing that is probably most important DLINQ - which is the data integration functionality - is the technoloogy that looks least impressive at this point with sort of a half baked Entity Manager. But again, it's very early nad DLINQ is the most high level of the LINQ family and it needs a stable base to grow.
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>I follow a few blogs of people who write/sell ORM tools and they all seem to have the same option of it. Namely, attribute based stuff doesn't scale well (and the fact that right now it appears to only apply to SQL server will be a huge problem if it's not fixed before release).
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>Since I'm primarily using C#, I really hope they make this stuff easier/less "weird" to use (like VB.NET) before release. Some of the syntax they came up with is just plain odd. For example, why should a developer have to learn a slightly different version of SQL? That's going to be really annoying.

Well, there was lots of talk about that at PDC, and during one of the final panel discussions Anders made a very good point that explained the reason the syntax works the way it does. The syntax is backwards for example to support intellisense. You have to be able to tell what you're getting hte data from in order to be able to get type information on hte actual statement itself. The filtering (ie. the SELECT portion) comes last because filtering is the last thing that happens in this scenario.

VB is getting around this by playing tricks with the editor and editor compilation, but their solution is also funky in that the cursor must jump back in forth to make this work.

The thing to remember about LINQ is that at its core it is NOT a data techology. It's a language technology that allows a highlevel abstraction layer ontop of querying a variety of data types. The way things are going I don't think you're going to see a 1:1 match between SQL and LINQ - for example to support inline T-SQL expressions. I could be wrong but I think that there will an abstraction mismatch between pure SQL and the language features. Certainly by looking at the examples provided you could see this to be the case - all the queries were pretty minimalistic.

But as I said there's lots of time yet to work on this. It'll be interesting to see where this gets taken. Even so I think this is an exciting feature because it makes querying, sorting, filtering and rearranging data so much easier. Even if it turns out that you can't use DLINQ for every kind of SQL command at the very least you will have the ability to get the result into a LINQ structure and work with it from there with further control on post processing and - do data munging (as so many people here like to call it - <g>) - after the fact.

+++ Rick --