But I would say that if Linq is as good as some of the MVPs are saying, having thousands of man-hours of previous non-Linq investment may not feel all that clever. ;-)

The more I think about this....this is just way off base, when you look at the larger picture.

At any one time, developers are often solving problems with more lines of code and different approaches, until some new feature comes along in the next version to make it simpler and more productive. Good developers not only know how to utilize the product functions that do exist, they also know how to develop functional workarounds for what isn't there, or what isn't there optimally.

Example: WCF. Prior to that, people wrote code to support multiple protocols. I'm sure many are happy about the WCF model, but any feelings (pro or con) re: cleverness are just not important. If anything, they'll carry forward the problem-solving capabilities to new challenges that will ultimately surface.

Case in point...the new try...catch capabilities that are in SQL 2005. They're very nice, and solve issues that database developers have had for years with exception handling. But guess what...there are a few flies in the ointment regarding raising errors. So SQL experts encounter it, they come up with something, they blog about it....and the entire process starts over. So until the next release comes along, many readers leverage this temporary 'cleverness'.


Kevin