Denis, see http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/29/update-on-linq-to-sql-and-linq-to-entities-roadmap.aspx including its comments. and Google "linq to sql dead" for some other reactions.

Behind the semantics, MS is allocating primary focus to the EF. People who tried, liked and began investing in L2S last year are now disadvantaged. The luddites who kept using typed datasets (or untyped datasets) and ADO - or VFP for that matter- are probably better off. QED.

In fairness, some people here had reservations about L2S. KG was unimpressed by query efficiency in some cases. Rick Strahl warned that insiders were saying that the EF would prevail and showed that some queries would cause a lot of round trips and inefficiency. The glaring deficiency I saw was that the change tracking did not survive passage between tiers unless you rolled your own, and it did not work with SSCE as recommended as a replacement for VFP cursors. So it wasn't perfect. The challenge now is to know how it will be replicated in the EF and when will be the right time to invest precious company or customer funds without risking obsolescence around the corner. I know that this is more worrying to some people than loss of MS support in 2014.