Bill,

>I've invested my limited time, brainpower, and $$ over the last year in getting up to speed (at least getting moving slowly) in C# and ASP.NET. I have no interest in picking up nuances of VB.NET. Is there going to be equivalent data capability in C#?

The .NET 3.0 framekwork part of LINQ is very extensive and features are still being added to it. Each language team is then writing their own "language integration" (Data language in the language itself) that will be mapped to calls to the LINQ framework behind the scenes.

There will be differences between the C# implementation and the VB implementation. For example, the LINQ framework now has (as of the March CTP release) new query expressions called "Take" and "Skip". These are used for paging through a large set of data, such as when you need to "take" the next 10 records, "step"ing over 4 previous pages of records that have already been displayed.

The C# language usage of this feature is method-based, something like (may not be exact, but close based on my scribbled notes):

(from something in something select something where something).Take(5)

VB works the same way, but also allows you to lose the surrounding parens around the select expression and just include the Take(5) right in the select statement instead of handling it like a method call:

from something in something select something where something take(5)

VB will implement most of the query expressions directly as above, in addition to the method-based calls, but C# so far has implemented fewer of them directly in the LINQ statement, preferring method calls for a good many of them. That might change in the future -- it all depends on development priorities for each individual team.

There will be little differences like that between the two versions, but probably will also be some larger differences -- this is just a trivial example. The larger differences are likely to be in the Intellisense area.

As for your comment about spending a year learning C#, you have spent most of that time learning the .NET framework and a smaller part of that time learning the C# syntax. Going to VB now won't be that big a deal. I have worked in both and suggest that you take a close look at the LINQ integration in both before deciding. The differences will likely end up being pretty minor. Tools like the object / relational mapping tool that we saw in the VB session today are actually going to be available in both VB and C# and will write classes in your project's target language based on a data structures and relations in a database).