Steve Eichert's Blog - Thoughts on DLINQ

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Now let’s talk about DLINQ.  I’m a big fan of attribute based programming.  I’ve long resisted giving into the xml mapping crowd that has been growing stronger and stronger in the O/R Mapping community.  I’ve conceded to them, having mappings defined in an external mapping file is a better approach.  Microsoft, you should concede to them as well.  Change DLINQ to use a mapping file rather then embedding everything within attributes. 

LINQ is amazing, make DLINQ equally as amazing.  Don’t make DLINQ just another mapper.  Make it something revolutionary.  Start thinking in more generic terms.  Don’t think of the mappings as Databases, Tables, and Columns.  Do think in terms of data stores, entities, and properties.  Make it so we can persist our objects to more then just a SQL Server database.  Give me persistence providers, allow me to persist to more then just SQL Server.

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I agree.  I think that if they are going to use an attribute based approach to O/R mapping that they should also support an external mapping file.

I am very excited about LINQ / DLINQ / XLINQ but then again, I was very exited about ObjectSpaces at the last PDC and we all know what happened to that…   I agree with Steve and I hope that they do something revolutionary here and not create yet another O/R mapper.