Last week the ADO.NET team posted an Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap, and since then there have been a lot of reaction postings popping up all over the place – followed of course by reaction postings to the reactions.
The original post is pretty typical management speak (except for the fact that it doesn't use the word 'Synergy' anywhere), but if it doesn't seem overly sinister to you then you apparently need to read between the lines. Hmm. This sort of sibling rivalry between LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework was always going to pick up at some point, and I wonder whether the community reactions really say more about people's like for LINQ to SQL or their dislike for the Entity Framework.
Personally, I like LINQ to SQL and hope it stays around in some form for some time to come. I've used it on many small and simple applications, and it's served me well. Sure, there was a bit of work and research required to find a way to make it fit nicely into a tiered application structure, and it's never going to be comparable to a full blown product such as LLBLGenPro, but for the right situation (small, quick, SQL Server based agile applications) it served it's purpose, has been easy to work with, and the price was right.
It can be pretty demoralising putting a personal investment into technology only to have it made obsolete. Ater spending a bit of time refining my L2S implementations I'd definitely feel slightly down to have the technology yanked completely, because part of my justification for investigating it's use over continuing with LLBLGenPro was that I figured LINQ to SQL would be around for a fair amount of time, so it'd be a good investment to have a data access recommendation that I could make to any customers who weren't interested money in LLBL licenses and time in upskilling in a third party product.
Obviously this is all speculation right now, and only time will tell what's actually going to happen, but given the fact that Entity Framework has been billed as the data access solution of choice for some time now, none of this should really be much of a surprise to anyone.
I'd be interested to see what LINQ to SQL might evolve into if it was eventually thrown out handed over to an open source team and hosted on CodePlex (yes, I'm aware of DbLinq but haven't had time to check it out – comments welcome if you have). I'm not sure whether Microsoft would ever set itself up to have it's flagship solution compete against it's discarded technology, but it'd certainly be interesting times if they did.
..and if they don't, I'll be quite happy to turn my attentions back to LLBLGenPro.
(I resisted partaking in bad LINK vs LINQ puns – thank me later)
Link: Clarifying the message on L2S Futures
Link: LINQ to SQL next steps