LINQ

Atlas is one of my favorite technologies announced in the PDC, with Windows Workflow Foundation comming close. Of course, I hope to get a chance to play with the Expression tools and with Office 12 soon.

But in my opinion, the most important announcement from the PDC is LINQ.

C# and VB become mixed functional/object oriented/imperative languages.

The data impedance mismatch is over. Rumors about this being ripped from Foxpro and 4GLs are largely wrong. This is much more elegant and powerful. As a developer, this is a happy day.

I have read some people concerned the idea that LINQ, specially DLINQ will push .NET develiopers to mess up the layered architecture.

You don't only isolate concatenated SQL in a DAL component for aestetic reasons.

You do it, for instance, for the abstraction and the scalability provided by a special execution environment.

But with LINQ the "functional power" of the query language is not anymore limited to data that is on the database. You can now use the same language constructs to query any data, regardless of location.

Thanks to all the teams that made this happen. You can count on me giving you feedback.

First two pieces of feedback:

• I want to see transactions to become a first class citizen in the CLR.
• I hope to see many legacy database 4GLs (includding FoxPro) to adopt the CLR as a runtime. Now that the CLR comes with queries, it can be a true life saver, both for the products and for the developers that mantain those billions of lines of code.