Out, out damn carpet wrinkle!

I've been skeptical of LINQ to SQL from the beginning. There is quite a bit of history (to understate) of attempts to "solve" the problem of the impedance mismatch between object-oriented applications and relational databases, and, like pushing down a carpet wrinkle, the problem never seems to go away, it just pops up somewhere else.

Now that the evidence is starting to come in, I can stop nursing my irresponsible speculation. And the web is confirming my suspicions:

1 - Scott Guthrie's most excellent introduction to LINQ to SQL is not one long post, nor three or even five long posts, but NINE long posts. Cancel my meetings, I've got a sharper axe!

2 - The stuff hasn't shipped and here's a very nice "gotchas" post. Turns out you have to know what's happening behind the scenes or your pleasant-looking C# will translate into horrendous SQL, after all.

3 - There seem to be about 3000 sessions on LINQ and the Entity Framework at this year's Dev Connections conference in Vegas.

Not to say LINQ to SQL isn't perhaps an improvement over classic (tempus fugit!) ADO.NET for many situations. But when I see a new subculture of support forming for an upcoming technology, I may just wonder if the previous stuff I'm used too isn't so bad.

To my mind, even more exciting than expressing queries in C# so that at run-time they can be automagically mapped to SQL queries, is expressing queries in C# that don't get mapped or translated at all, they just are what they are and do what they say.