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There certainly have been a lot of rumors flying around the blogosphere the last 48 hours regarding LINQ to SQL.  I saw three stories on the front page of DotNetKicks alone.

Joe Rattz just made a comment on my last post that Scott Guthrie has dispelled all of the rumors. In Joe’s post, Scott says:

Regarding LINQ to SQL, we definitely don’t have plans to drop this.  We plan to continue to fully support this going forward.

I actually blog most of my samples using LINQ to SQL these days (I just did one last week on ASP.NET MVC form scenarios and used LINQ to SQL for the data access).  Expect to see me continue to blog more about it in the future.

This is good news.  I won’t post links to them, but I’ve seen some pretty nasty comments left on other blogs regarding the perceived death of LINQ to SQL.

And besides — think about it — LINQ to SQL is part of the .NET Framework 3.0/3.5 — there’s no way that they can remove it anyway.

Thanks for letting me know, Joe! (BTW, great book!  It’s one of the most well-written down-to-earth and thorough books on LINQ out there.  Very helpful.)

The last few days I’ve been doing quite a bit of database design and implementation.  I wanted to take advantage of the new LINQ to SQL technology, following along with the book “Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008“.  Needless to say, I was googling around quite a bit for example code, etc, and stumbled across this post by the ADO.NET team:

We’re making significant investments in the Entity Framework such that as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios.  We are listening to customers regarding LINQ to SQL and will continue to evolve the product based on feedback we receive from the community as well.

I don’t know about you, but that seems to sound like they’re trying to kill off LINQ to SQL in favor of the Entity Framework.  I always did wonder why there were two ORM-esque framework coming out of Redmond.

Seems like I’m not the only one to think this, though calling it “dead” might be overreaction.

Nice, just when I was getting into the swing of things…  It doesn’t look like Entity Framework has been tried-and-tested completely yet either.

Maybe I’ll switch to NHibernate.  It certainly seems more stable.

I’ve blogged about the CCR and DSS components as part of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio in the past. It always did seem weird for the need to download the huge 200MB MSRDS installer just to get the 50k CCR libraries.

Thankfully, they just announced at PDC this week that Microsoft has extracted out the CCR and DSS libraries into their own product!  This is fantastic.

George Chrysanthakopoulos recently did a short Channel9 interview yesterday explaining all of this. Another video certainly worth checking out is his PDC talk from Monday.

In the video, George talks about Siemens using the CCR system to perform large-scale asynchronous mail sorting.  This is amazing stuff.

It looks like the CCR and DSS Toolkit is available commercially for $400, though I’m waiting for it to become available (free for academic use) on DreamSpark and MSDNAA

I just had a number of cool links fly by in my email and figured I’d post them here so I can find them later. (Thanks Mike!)

• From Microsoft to Google, and back to Microsoft Again – Sergey Solyanik has a really interesting discussion about the cultures at both Microsoft and Google
• Nvidia’s Tesla S1070 Teraflop Processor – Teraflop in a 1U rack-mount!  Wow, just wow.
• A Managed Library for Easy General Purpose GPU Programming – Program your teraflop GPU hardware using C#.  Download link.  Note to self: Experiment with this later
• Source Code Released for Sandcastle – Anand has decided to release the source code for Sandcastle (Microsoft’s replacement for NDoc).  Hopefully this will jump-start the project and get some momentum.  Is it finished already?
• Wintellect PowerCollections – This is a really interesting collection library for .NET that adds support for a lot of things missing in the BCL like sets, bags, ordered dictionaries, dequeue, priority queue, etc.
• C5 Collection Library – Another great collection library for .NET, and has a lot of support for events (item added, item removed, etc).  This one has much, much more documentation and seems to be larger.
• xUnit Unit Testing Framework – A ground-up rethink of unit testing for .NET.  A lot of discussion about how xUnit differs from NUnit and mbUnit is here.  There’s also an excellent book about test patterns with xUnit.

And as a bonus link, completely free:

• World’s Cheapest Optical Mousepad – Print it, tape it down to your desk, and never worry about your mouse jumping around anymore.

Wow, that was all over the place.  Enjoy!