It may not be better than what you have. I use EF all the time. Most of my work is new development or maintaining applications that I wrote in the past three years that used EF when first written. EF has made it easier to get data in and out of the database.

EF does not remove the need for a DAL nor would it remove the need for business objects.

But keep in mind that LINQ is more than data access. LINQ can be used for XML, collections, lists, and other objects.

At my current gig, they have a third-party product that has a very strange web API. Being that the database schema is strange too, the API is the best way to access the data. I was tasked with writing a C# wrapper around it. The first version looks very much like ADO.Net where you have to create connection, command, and other objects. It works, but seems clunky compared to using LINQ, so I gave myself a low-priority project to write a LINQ provider for it.

>Thanks Craig I'll take a look - there's certainly more to LINQ than meets the eye. While I have your ear, what are your thoughts on the entity framework ( which is what spawned my dabbling with LINQ ) would you use it in preference to biz classes and dal / stored procedures ? , over the years I've built up a fairly simple data access class which works very well and is reliable, it provides the basic requirements i.e access to connections, commands and parameter related methods and properties. I struggle to see the benefit of EF over what I have but maybe its because I don't do the web side of things.