LINQ To SQL dead in the water?
Hopefully not but it certainly appears that way. I discovered this earlier today, can’t remember where I saw the first reference, and found a couple of great posts here and here. As someone who uses LINQ to SQL a lot with my personal projects this is very disappointing but it appears the writing is on the wall. As pointed out in this article about TDD with LINQ LINQ to SQL was always advertised in beta as being extensible so providers for other DBs could be created but it appears that this was removed in favor of SQL Server only at RTM.
I’ve always been a supporter of Microsoft but stuff like this is only going to add to the negative image they already have. The made something that was great and did its job well and at the last minute crippled it. Now LINQ to SQL has been moved to the same team in charge of the Entity Framework, which is definitely not finding favor with developers, which has left it for dead. Now the functionality that was originally in LINQ to SQL v1 (disabled not because of technical reasons, but political ones) is going to be included in to the Entity Framework which adds an overwhelming level of complexity that is not needed by the segment LINQ to SQL fits well.
If the ADO.NET team does kill off LINQ to SQL by ignoring it I definitely won’t be switching to Entity Framework unless they find a way to make it LINQ to SQL (quite an interesting thought huh). If you use or like LINQ to SQL let them know and just maybe they will listen.