TechEd - LINQ Presentation by Scott Gunthrie

LINQ is the new functionality coming out with Visual Studio 2008 that makes querying data a core programming concept.  It can work with direct connection to a relational database or querying XML, although VB.Net has much more functionality in the XML area, which I think is a shame because I think that most developers now are using C#. 

For example you can copy and paste XML directly on a VB file and Visual Studio will recognize it as XML.   You cannot do that with C# yet which is a big bummer because I am a C# programmer and see a lot of uses for that type of functionality.

For more details on LINQ check out Scott Gunthie's site.  He is the General Manager of Microsoft who gave one of the demos on LINQ.

I went to two demos and took a lab on LINQ and I really think this is going to create a paradigm shift for developers.  I think the days of creating stored procedures in databases are coming to end.  With the advent many different OR mapping tools like nHibernate and now LINQ hitting the seen and all of them dynamically creating SQL on the fly, why spend time writing stored procedures?  

The whole thought behind the need for writing stored procedures was that it was more secure and it was faster.  Regarding security, you will have to be careful not to allow SQL Injection but once you are past that you are secure.  Regarding performance; everything I am reading and hearing is that it really does not make that big of a difference if you query is inline or in a stored procedure.  Plus having LINQ generating the query statements for you takes the DBA out of the picture making the application easier to deploy.