DLINQ renamed
As is typical at Microsoft conferences, they have a way of announcing code name changes. Yesterday, they renamed WinFx. Today, Andres Aquiar stated that DLINQ is being changed to "LINQ to SQL". In addition, they are working on "LINQ to Entities" which is reference to a mysterious Ado.Next document that was published and then pulled within hours of being released. For those of you who are interested in how the two fit together, I recommend checking out the Channel 9 video at http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=202138 where Anders Hejlsberg and Sam Druker discuss the changes.
From the looks of things, the change is a precursor to the provider model that has been planned for some time to allow for a pluggable structure for Query implementations. The structure of the code becomes even more declarative and separated from the actual data storage mechanism. I can easily see LINQ to XML and LINQ to Objects as natural extensions. The video mentioned LINQ to WMI and LINQ to AD as being other interesting ones.
Although I was skeptical at first, it does appear to be a step in the right direction. Also, unlike some initial reactions, I do not see the change as Microsoft killing off DLINQ as some have claimed as they did with Object Spaces, but rather building on top of the language extensions to bridge into other manners of describing and retrieving data from the data store.
Thanks to Ken Tucker for pointinig out the Channel 9 Video and Fabrice Marguerie for the post on LinqInAction which let me know about the changes. Time to work on the slide deck for the Tallahassee Code Camp this weekend to take care of the changes. Luckily Ken is doing DLINQ (er. LINQ to SQL) and I'm doing LINQ and the language changes, so I don't have to make as many modifications.