.Net creator sees developer future with Linq

IDG News Service - As the man credited with creating .Net, Anders Hejlsberg has been in charge of making it easier for developers to build increasingly complex applications for years.

With a new technology called .Net Language Integrated Query, or Linq, introduced by Microsoft Corp. at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) Tuesday, Hejlsberg said the software maker has taken another step forward toward solving a common problem for developers: how to integrate various sources of data into applications built with object-oriented programming models.

"With a lot of programs today, you're not only saying what you want the program to do; you are saying in painful detail how you want it done," said Hejlsberg, a Microsoft technical fellow. "The way we get to take advantage of all of the progress in CPUs and memory is offloading some of that 'how to' to the infrastructure."

One way to do this is to simplify how developers bring relational data that's stored in databases more seamlessly into .Net applications, he said. Linq is Microsoft's early attempt at bridging the gap between data and object-oriented programming, Hejlsberg said.

The framework, which is available to developers at the PDC as a community technical preview, adds data-query capability to .Net. This capability applies to all forms of data, so developers can query data from various sources, such as databases or XML documents, right within their Visual Basic (VB) and C# code, Hejlsberg said. VB and C# are two common languages used to develop .Net applications.

Currently, the most common way to bring data from databases into an application developed in .Net is through SQL. However, SQL uses a completely different vocabulary from languages such as C# and VB that .Net developers use to build applications, so it takes a lot of coding to bring the two languages together in one development framework, Hejlsberg said.

"Programmers writing enterprise applications [say] that sometimes when it comes to data, they feel more like plumbers than programmers" because they have to create ways to link the two languages to access data, he said. "There is no native understanding of the query language in C# or Visual Basic," Hejlsberg said.

Another problem with SQL is it can only be used to query data in relational databases. If developers want to access data from an XML document or from a source other than a database, where much of enterprise data now lives, they have to do it another way, Hejlsberg said. "There is a lack of coverage when it comes to query," he said.

Eventually, as LINQ becomes more fully developed, it will support all