Julia is talking about LINQ and you know what, I'm worried. Not about her or the blog entry (it's perfect for the audience it's aimed at) but about LINQ itself and how we, the bleeding edge technies, respond and propogate the information. Julia is doing the right thing - learning something new and allowing the information to flow into the blogosphere; letting people know what the project is all about. As Julia said, she put it aside as it's so far off and I've done the same, but I think we all fll into the trap of relaying information about new projects/products without thinking about the long term consequences. That, of course, is the danger of blogging; it's quick and easy. Too easy. Anyway, back to the point - LINQ. Maybe it's not even LINQ itself I'm worried about, but the simplistic demos and samples we're all being shown. It's new and cool, and the idea is compulsive, but how about something useful? How about practical, real world examples of what this technology can do for us? We're being sucked into showing simplistic examples purely because they are small and easy to show. While that's great to get the point across, the problem is that people take this as the limit of the technology and best practice - you'd be surprised how many people learn about new stuff by searching google and copy the code they find. I know litlle enough about LINQ as it is and I don't want to think, nor give the idea to others, that all LINQ is good for is embedding XML within our code. I think we have to ensure we keep blogging and writing articles about LINQ to add more examples to ensure as much information is available as possible.
The first time I saw LINQ was at a design review in Redmond last year, and some of us (all ASP.NET experts) just shock our heads and said "Dear God, no". I really want to believe this type of thing is useful and I love the idea of strongly type data access, but I'm really not sure this is the way to go. Think for a moment about the consequences. For years we've been trying to drag people into separating code from content, data from UI, trying to get people to put a minimum of architectural design into applications; we've dragged people away from the ASP style of code scattered throughout the page. Now we're supposed to tell people it's OK to scatter data throughout the code, mix your data with object references and make code harder to read and maintain? I don't think so. Maybe it's too early. Maybe this information is already out there and I just haven't found it, or looked in the right places. Maybe you don't care. Maybe I'll shut up now.
[Listening to: Bob Harris Saturday - - ]