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Language Integrated Query (LINQ) feedback

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We're getting strong feedback on Language Integrated Query (LINQ), both in-person at PDC and online.  Here are some of the online sources I've been reading today:

  • Channel9: customer comments on the Anders Hejlsberg LINQ video.
  • CRN: Gates: Vista Workflow, LINQ Extensions To Benefit Partners.  "Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the Community Technology Preview of Windows Vista and Technical Preview of its LINQ Project are aimed at ISVs and developers but that solution providers are fast becoming part of that world."
  • InfoWorld: .Net creator sees developer future with LINQ.  "As the man credited with creating .Net, Anders Hejlsberg has been in charge of making it easier for developers to build increasingly complex applications for years. With a new technology called .Net Language Integrated Query, or LINQ, introduced by Microsoft at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) Tuesday, he said the software giant has taken another step forward toward solving a common problem for developers: how to integrate various sources of data into applications built with object-oriented programming models."
  • Microsoft Watch: Microsoft Rolls Out the Missing LINQ.  "Anders Hejlsberg, the father of the C# programming language, has been hinting for months that he was working on a way to be able to query simultaneously objects, databases, XML and other data stores. On Tuesday at the Professional Developers Conference, Hejlsberg unveiled the fruit of his labor: The Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Project. LINQ extends C# or Visual Basic with native language syntax. Microsoft is providing PDC attendees with early LINQ bits, company officials said."
  • PDCBloggers.net: LINQ blog posts from PDC bloggers.

--Scott

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2005
    All LINQ stuff looks great.

    Will the native inline XML support be added (again) to C# as I find this really neat when you already have a block of XML you wish to parameterise. On the basis of developer productivity alone xml = <emps><emp id="${empid}"/></emps> is more efficient than having to convert it all to element structures first. This is more valid the larger the XML gets - unless you are going to add a refactoring convert XML to element structure :)

    Also, is there any news one the proposed Concurrency extensions originally in Polyphonic C#/Comega? Will they see the light of day in C# 3?
  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2005
    I blogged earlier with some of the early news items and feedback&amp;nbsp;on Language Integrated Query (LINQ).&amp;nbsp;...
  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2005
    I blogged earlier with some of the early news items and feedback&amp;nbsp;on Language Integrated Query (LINQ).&amp;nbsp;...
  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2005
    C# doesn't plan to implement XML literals, though we might think about this more based on customer feedback on VB's early work in this area. Our main purpose in talking about LINQ so early is to get this kind of feedback early enough that we can respond to it.

    There is an interesting "who's on top" issue at play here. We've done a lot of work with ASP.NET to have C# and VB code and tools work well in the middle of markup (code within markup). Having XML literals in the language (markup within code) inverts this.

    The larger the template XML is, the more it seems like the "code within markup" model makes sense. The smaller the XML pieces are, the more the "markup within code" model makes sense. Supporting both is potentially interesting, but in the big gray area in the middle, there would be two ways to do the same thing, and this would be unfortunate from a complexity standpoint.

    Anders made a comment about this in his C# 3.0 talk yesterday. His comment was basically that languages are more stable than most platform technologies, and therefore language designers must be careful to avoid tight coupling between the language and individual technologies. Before doing XML literal support, we would think hard about finding ways to have this dependency be loose. We would want to understand how the language support would evolve in a compatible way even if there were significant changes in XML or the XML support in the .NET Framework.

    --Scott
  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2005
    I find Db4o´s Predicate aproach cleaner and more powerfull. What do you think about it?