During the PDC the following statement came out of the data programmability team:

"We're making significant investments in the Entity Framework such that as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios.  We are listening to customers regarding LINQ to SQL and will continue to evolve the product based on feedback we receive from the community as well."

Apparently a lot of people in the community interpreted this as the obituary of LINQ to SQL and there has been a lot of harsh words, some comments even suggested that the team ha deceived it's users.

I would like to put in a comment in this debate. First of all, LINQ to SQL wasn't a product of the data programmability team, it was actually put out by another team and gradually incorporated into the data team. At the time the data programmability team was building it's own technology so they didn't really ask for this dual products thing.

Secondly, the comment above does not tell me that they are discontinuing support for LINQ to SQL any time soon, what they are saying is that the efforts will be in the Entity Framework, which is their product from the start, LINQ to SQL isn't.

Third, after attending the EF futures talk at PDC and had a little chat with Daniel Simmons in the expo I interpret the above statement very different than the loud mouths that do what they can to discredit the whole team, my interpretation is that it's the teams intention to continue support L2S but since EF is the preferred product we'll more likely see a merge where the lightweight of L2S will be available in EF than a complete discontinue.

So in conclusion, chill, I'm certain that the team wouldn't do the mistake of killing a product that so many are using any time soon.  And seriously to you who betted large on L2S: From day on the announcement of EF it has always been said that L2S is target at RAD applications and that EF will be the preferred enterprise solution. So why are you even surprised?

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The post: http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/29/update-on-linq-to-sql-and-linq-to-entities-roadmap.aspx

Response from the team to the critics: http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/31/clarifying-the-message-on-l2s-futures.aspx