Miha is not a native English speaker, so give him some slack on his English
diction.
An ORM is an Object Relational Mapper. It takes relational data, like a SQL
Server table, and maps it to objects. That is basically what LINQ does,
although I would not call it a true ORM.
Where I believe LINQ shows promise is in the abstraction of the actual data
store. In theory, you can write a query once and run it against XML, or SQL,
or a variety of other sources. In practice, it is a bit more difficult than
the marketing material, but this will improve.
It also is very ORM like, as it creates objects from your data, but it is
not what you find in traditional ORM products.
Whether or not it makes sense to use it depends on your applications. If you
are working internal applications and your company is fairly set on
platform, you can probably wait. If you sell products that talk to a variety
of stores, it might make sense. If you are not currently using business
objects, LINQ can help.
The downside Miha mentions in his blog post (n-tiers in specific) is
partially a problem with the samples out there, as I believe one could
design a decent enough n-tier structure around LINQ. I will agree, however,
that the tools are far behind the technology. That is fairly typical of MS.
Should you try LINQ? Sure. It is fun to play around with, if nothing else.
And, you will likely learn some new things about programming, even if you do
not adopt LINQ. If you take it deep enough to learn Lambda expressions, it
is probably worth the trip, especially considering the likelihood the C#
team will expand in the offering in the next version (a guess, but a good
one).
--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP, MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA
*************************************************
| Think outside the box!
|
*************************************************