>My two cents: if you're using stored procs in SQL Server, there is not much of a convincing reason to use LINQ to SQL (and in my opinion, LINQ to SQL is, in some instances, a few steps backwards)

Compared to what? DataSets? <s>

Beta 2 supposedly hooks up stored procedures as methods in the DbContext object. I haven't tried this myself and I'm not sure exactly how that would work given that the results could be scalars or result sets but it sounds interesting.

Don't forget there's also the Entity framework which is a more full fledged ORM implementation that has much better control over entity and context manager. You can also use LINQ with it.

Finally LINQ to SQL can also be integrated into your own data access scheme. I've been playing around with hooking up LINQ to SQL to my business objects so data retrieval can go into my own generated entities (which have a number of additional features).

There's a lot of flexibility there to do your own thing if you chose.

But to be honest I don't have the full grasp over what can and can't be done either - I'm sure given MS history in the data space there be plenty for limitations to bitch about <s>...

+++ Rick ---