LINQ, Anders Hejlsberg, and Wrox press' SharpZipLib

Call it midichlorians and a mini-convergence of the force. I don't care. But, the fact is that I experience fun coincidences all of the time. Wrox Press steamroller and publishing friend, Jim Minatel, had posted a comment to my blog. Meanwhile, I had responded to an internal discussion thread about ZIP/UnZIP functions where I mentioned the SharpZipLib offered up by the SharpDevelop crew who have a Wrox Press title. Cool.

Anders must have had Anakin-level midichlorians when he sketched out the LINQ initiative. LINQ could become the uber-ODBC for data of nearly any kind. Yesterday, at our all-hands meeting for the developer division he did a runthrough of his PDC presentation and demos about LINQ. I've seen it before, but it still amazes me. Plus, Anders added some jokes that only our division could fully appreciate. Anders is hyper-smart, but he is a great communicator too. The great thing is that any building here is filled with a lot of people who are like Anders. The fact that he is a stand-out in this crowd makes him all the more impressive.

But, all of that doesn't mean much if we cannot produce what customers want. For all of the complexity that Anders can discern, he conceives things that are so simple and straightforward. LINQ is the best example. Whatever we're paying him, let's keep his direct-deposit going.

I have a ton of ideas around WordProcessingML and LINQ. Now, all I need is a VS 2005 RTM-compatible version of the LINQ preview, and I'm in business. Patric Johansson makes a good point about Oracle and the embedding of the LINQ provider right into the db query engine, although, I disagree with him in that LINQ has less to do with db engines and more to do with language compilers. Nonetheless, this is where the LINQ-ODBC analogy comes back into relevance. I predict that other languages and query engines will be compelled to get on board with our LINQ initiative because of the pervasive impact it will make.

Rock Thought for the Day: I like Three Days Grace's self-titled album. Melodic and heavy. I appreciate that the vocals are fairly straight-forward. This is where Godsmack occasionally falters: the vocals sound too much like the singer from Crash Test Dummies (early 90's in case you have gratefully forgotten!). For my part, my voice is losing its quality. One of the effects of my accident in addition to the partial loss of vision in my left eye is a nagging cough (doc thinks its acid reflux from a potential ulcer) and a voice that no longer holds vibrato as it once did. I may sound like Celtic Frost after all. :(

Rock On