“Microsoft kills Linq to SQL” and other links…
Ayende @ Rahien: “Doing something like this is spitting in the face of everyone who [invested] time and money in the Linq to SQL framework, only to be left hanging in the wind, with a dead end software and a costly porting process if they ever want to see new features. Linq to SQL is a decent base level OR/M, and I had had several people tell me that they are willing to accept its current deficiencies, knowing that this will be fixed in the next version. Now, there isn’t going to be a next version, and that is really bad for Microsoft reputation. …From my point of view, this is going to be an example that I will use whenever someone tries to sell me half baked solutions from Microsoft (just to note, I don’t consider Linq to SQL half baked) and tell me to wait for vNext with all the features in the world. …It doesn’t matter how I turn this decision, I can’t find any way in which it make sense from Microsoft perspective.” It would be a cultural first for Microsoft to let LINQ to SQL vanish. My guess is that it will freeze—perhaps getting update scraps from LINQ to Entities. My other guess is that LINQ to SQL (and the current version of LINQ to Entities) does not have a compelling Dependency Inversion story.
10/2008: “Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap”
Tim Mallalieu, ADO.NET team: “We have seen great momentum with LINQ in the last year. In .NET Framework 3.5 we released several LINQ providers, including LINQ to SQL which set the bar for a great programming model with LINQ over relational databases. In .NET 3.5 SP1, we followed up that investment with the Entity Framework enabling developers to build more advanced scenarios and to use LINQ against any database including SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, etc. …We’re making significant investments in the Entity Framework such that as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios. We are listening to customers regarding LINQ to SQL and will continue to evolve the product based on feedback we receive from the community as well.”
“Generating Interfaces for LINQ to SQL Entities”
ThinqLinq.com: “As part of the presentation, I showed Damien Guard’s L2ST4 code generation template. The great thing about these templates is that they are fully customizable. If you’ve been following this blog, you may remember my post showing adding property Get logging to LINQ to SQL with T4. In this post, I’m going to show you how to add the ability to generate and implement interfaces for the table’s columns. I’m only going to show implementing the table’s columns and not the associations. Additionally, you will need to modify this if you use inheritance in your LINQ to SQL models. I’m using the VB Template in this example, but the C# changes are very similar. Hopefully, you will see how easy it is to make these kinds of changes and can add these extensions yourself if necessary.” This 2009 article shows me that significant numbers of developers are working around a Microsoft limitation.