Just came from Anders Hejlsberg’s talk on C# 3.0 and LINQ. You can

actually download

a LINQ tech previewfrom MSDN, here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/

The language features that had to go into place to allow for LINQ are quite

impressive, and I’ll have to play around with them myself to really wrap my

brain around them since many of them involve rethinking how I think about

programming. However, the potential is very great, since someone

proficient in C# (and LINQ) would be able to effectively work with data from

many different sources (XML, Relational Database, various collection types)

without having to learn separate query languages (SQL, XQuery/XPath, custom

methods) for each one. Having a powerful query language built into the

programming language would also do a lot to help keep business logic in the

application and its components, rather than in the database as stored procedures

or in literal SQL strings within the language.