Well, it's official. One of my predictions (http://theruntime.com/blogs/devprime/archive/2008/09/02/prognostication.net.aspx) has somewhat come true. Microsoft officially announced today on the ADO Team Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/29/update-on-linq-to-sql-and-linq-to-entities-roadmap.aspx) that starting with .NET 4.0 (the next release), Entity Framework will be THE choice of relational LINQ technology, and LINQ to SQL is taking a back seat. This all made sense to me, because LINQ to SQL's limitations were just lame. It looked and felt like a tie-over product, meant to hold the LINQ to DB line until something better came along. The problem was that the "something better" (EF) still needed a lot of development work and wasn't ready...

I was emailing with a VS languages team member yesterday, and asked him why he wrote a piece of code a certain way (just some sample snippet that he used to illustrate an idea in the email thread). He responded that he normally codes day-to-day in C++, and generally distrusts the language, so he tries to be as explicit as possible. And that got me thinking about the concept of trustworthy languages. It seems like sometimes we're so focused on the addition features related to many other engineering aspects and goals, that we normally don't ask the question: "at the end of...