DLinq: What's cooking in the kitchen

OK, after hibernating in the winter, I am back on the blog.

Some of you joined us on DLinq chat last week so you already have a sense of what is going on. For others, here is a peek at what we are working on:

  1. Inheritance: table-per-hierarchy: It turns out that this feature is more interesting in the LINQ context than in a traditional ORM sense (e.g. ObjectSpaces). Languages like C# and VB provide you a variety of ways to work with types and they all show up in DLinq queries. Take for example C# operators is, as and typeof.
  2. Provider model: yes, we heard your requests and hope to have something on this front. Right from the beginning, DLinq has been intended for all relational databases, not just Microsoft SQL Server which we covered in the preview. At the same time, given the limited resources of our team, it is unrealistic for us to support a broad range of databases (and their various versions, SKUs etc.). That is why we are working on a provider story that ISVs, database vendors and the community can run with.
  3. A designer - yes, a cool tool to do your object models from DB and generate mapping.
  4. More sproc / function support: strongly typed ways to use stored procs and user defined functions
  5. Better conflict handling for optimistic concurrency exceptions
  6. A story for detached object - this is handy for stateless situations like ASP.NET, web services etc.

Now let's see which of these can get into the next preview. It is going to be a challenge.

Tell us your thoughts about these features and more things.