The journey continues (musings of a LINQer)

Good question - in the kitchen of course!

The dish is now ready on the LINQ home page and our VP - Soma has a nice blog about it already. I feel exhausted but happy to be able to share the results of "our" work with you.  

The word "our" in English is strange - it has both inclusive and exclusive meanings. Here, I mean it the truly in inclusive sense - something that belongs to we + you. Not to be too corny but since the last PDC, many of you pushed us where we needed to be pushed. Repeatedly, you told us what we got right and what we missed. The list of the latter is rather long - many features that you would like to see. So we took the list we had in mind (graphical designer for mapping, inheritance, joins, better opt concurrency conflict information) and added to it the items that kept coming up - stronger sproc support, external mapping etc. So what you are seeing is also the result of your contribution. Not to mention the fact that we build it so you can build better apps quicker (OK I admit, I like better tools for my own use but that wouldn't justify all the work). So thanks for all your interest and work. We hope you like the results of the two.

Of course, it is not done. We had to pick a set that we could preview in reasonable period of time while integrating with other parts of .NET framework and Visual Studio. Now, we really have to focus on productizing the preview. There are a few features that will sneak in but the first priority is to get this in shape for Orcas. Integrate better, fill in the little gaps, round out the features, fix bugs, do perf tuning, optimizations, fit and finish, localize - there are millions of things to do before the preview becomes a product component.

There are a few more interesting things on the way but more about it some other day. Need to run for one of the million meetings.