Walter,

...but it does not make sense to slam LINQ in the face for that.

If you think I'm 'slamming LINQ' in the face, then you clearly don't understand what I've said. And unless you've actually rolled up your sleeves with either beta for VS08, then odds are high that you don't have a strong handle on the issue, which wouldn't be the first time.

LINQ in general is a great new feature - it allows you to query collections, XML, arrays, etc, using similar syntax. That is the great value of LINQ - that you don't have to write different syntax to query each type of object. And the language capabilities like Lambdas supplement LINQ very nicely. I'm using Beta2 of VS08 for an internal project of mine, and am making heavy use of LINQ and the new language features.

But I have no plans to use LINQ to SQL. It's a step backwards from stored procedures.

By the way, last night I spoke at a SQL Server User's Group in the Mid-Atlantic, and afterwards talked with someone who is almost universally viewed as a highly-respected individual from the VFP and SQL Server world, someone who has worked and trained on both sides of the globe. I'm not mentioning the person's name, but suffice it to say that this individual is an even stauncher supporter of stored procedures than I am, and appreciated the fact that my presentation was devoted exclusively to stored procs. And it certainly wasn't much different from other dialog I've had with other folks. So this "narrow, limited" view is a creation in your mind.

Many developpers (including MVPs) just do not have the experience of such data integration and really don't realise the implications of this step.

Ah, I forgot....here we go again, you are part of the annointed few, with the shining light of awareness of data-driven apps.

(SQL server is not targeted at .NET exclusively).

Exclusively? Of course not. But there's an increasingly large point of intersection between the two.