LINQ - got a lot done for free?

Many software developers, including myself, working with Microsoft's tools today feel that it is getting more difficult to follow the giant's steps, at least for us who have some system responsibility. We have a large business system and just when we have evaluated and taken the decision to move from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0, Microsoft announces the Visual Studio 2008 beta 2. The same is valid for our database server, MS SQL Server, we are about to upgrade our 40 GB database to SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft has already announced the news in SQL Server 2008. The life cycle of development has definitly become shorter.

In the 2008 release of Visual Studio there are news such as C# 3.0, see the C# 3.0 language specification and LINQ.
Right now I'm too busy to get an idea of the possible improvements it could give us at work. So far, I've understood that LINQ is a kind of bridge between the programming and data domains and making it data model independent. Too often Microsoft architects and developers think more widely that we would admit and for that reason I would not say as I did once that this new technology will not be as useful as Microsoft expects. But I see, with a little bit of worry, some behaviour similarities between LINQ and the Delphi TTable component back in old days. Classes that generate SQL code behind the scenes leaving the programmer without any control over them are not much appretiated by me. Of course I hope I'm wrong about this ;-)

But, for those who like such a stuff, there is an interesting article about the impact of LINQ on the C# design can be found here.

Regarding C# 3.0, I will read the news in the language specification and maybe write about some of them.