More on Visual Basic 9.0 and LINQ versus SQL

eWeek's Darryl K. Taft takes on the Visual Basic .NET naysayers in his October 10, 2005 "Will VB 9 Win Over the VB 6 Faithful?" piece. (The original headline was "Visual Basic Gets Complicated.") After reviewing VB.COM developers' unsuccessful petition drive to reincarnate VB6 from it's legacy-platform purgatory, Taft makes the following unattributed observation:

Moreover, with the Language Integrated Query framework, which lets users program data and access databases for data without having to know or use SQL, Microsoft is delivering even more to developers. [Emphasis added.]

The preceding statement might be true for C# programmers for whom Anders Hejlsberg has created a set of mysterious LINQ query keywords that appear intended to mask their SQL counterparts. However, the VB query-language implementation is drawn directly from SQL, as illustrated in my September 26, 2005 "Comparing C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 LINQ Syntax" post. There is no way that VB programmers—or C# developers, for that matter—can write effective database queries without SQL competency, whether they adopt LINQ and DLinq or not. --rj Update 10/11/2005: Paul Vick takes Darryl to task for the reference to VB 9, which Paul calls "almost-entirely-vaporware" in his "Forest vs. trees" entry of the same date. There's no question that VB 9.0 is more vaporous than C# 3.0; for example, as mentioned earlier the current VB 9.0 implementation doesn't support DLinq.

Technorati: LINQ DLinq XLinq VB 9.0 C# 3.0