Friday, July 28, 2006

Why LINQ will succeed

by fmarguerie via Fabrice's weblog on 7/28/2006 8:51:00 PM

In the official Linq forum, Joe Albahari presents the reasons why he thinks Linq will succeed:

1. LINQ syntax beats SQL syntax. SQL is flawed in that queries become exponentially difficult to write as their complexity grows. LINQ scales much better in this regard. Once you get used to it, it's hard to go back.
2. Database queries are easily composable. You can conditionally add an ORDER BY or WHERE predicate without discovering at run-time that a certain string combination generates a syntax error.
3. More bugs are picked up at compile-time.
4. Parameterization is automatic and type-safe.
5. LINQ queries can directly populate an object hierarchy.
6. LINQ to SQL provides a model for provider independence that might really work.
7. LINQ significantly cuts plumbing code and clutter. Without sweeping stuff under the carpet, like Workflow or Datasets. This is a credit to the design team.
8. C# hasn't suffered in the process (in fact, it's gained).

There are some bugs in the PDC – also some obstacles to implementing MetaModel and IDbContext without reverse engineering, but nothing unfixable. Looking forward to the release!