Last night me, and some others from Madgex, headed off to a VBUG evening at the Clarendon Centre. Last nights speaker was Ian Cooper and he spoke about LINQ within C# 3.0. A subject I've heard about, but not seen much about. Ian presented highlights of 2 talks he has previously presented, one about LINQ in general and one about LINQ to SQL.

LINQ looks really interesting, and like it might be a really good addition to the toolkit to allow for quicker development of certain projects. It is a shame that LINQ to SQL currently only has SQL Server interfaces available, but hopefully other providers will come along before too long. I really like the idea of having the ability to change the physical database provider without having to write new database access code. I am, however, a database kind of girl, and enjoy writing SQL, so I'll still fight to have some SQL intervention sometimes - Ian said that LINQ won't always be performant, so some intervention will be needed at these points - maybe that is where I'll be able to make use of my SQL skills.

I've never been to any of the VBUG events before, but if the caliber of last nights is anything to go by I'll be heading along again soon. Especially if the pizza, beer and free book are usual.