wagnerblog.com

Both Roger Jennings and Rick Strahl are pointing out, each in his own way, that LINQ isn’t getting a lot of love in some quarters.  Roger connects the dots for slow thinkers like myself and points out that Rob Connery’s contribution of SubSonic to the ASP.NET team actually means that there is a real honest to goodness trend toward using an OSS based tool. And that this choice actually shows a preference of sorts. It would not be suprising if ScottGu denies that connection . But it doesnt matter. What matter is that he took steps to hire Rob and to get people like Phil and Hanselman on his team. Good stuff.

I love SubSonic and have cheered Rob on from afar for as long as he has been toiling on it. At the same time I have not been the biggest fan of LINQ simply because in comparison to other tools it just seems rather lacking. To me. My opinion. Yes its subjective I know. But one reason why I like it when opinion makers like Roger and Rick mention alternate technologies is simply that it helps me when I try to convince a customer to use a particular non-MS tool. I am still amazed on a daily basis how many IT Managers will not consider any tools that don’t come from Redmond. Wow. Talk about drinking the kool-aid. Anyway. Time will tell. For the moment I am excited about the changes taking place in the ASP.NET group.

Of course having some sort of LINQ compatibility is probably in the cards for many tool vendors out there. But in the end, as Roger points out, the fact that LINQ is lacking some very necessary aspects for an ORM just means the alternate solutions will hopefully end up winning the day.

Update: Rocky Lhotka has a way with words and explains in one short paragraph what the core problem with LINQ is - it produces IEnumerable resultsets that are not live updateable. His CSLA framework has been one of the most widely used business object architectures in the .NET industry. He knows what he is talking about.