Switching to LINQ

Question

I\'m considering spending time learning and using LINQ to SQL but after years of best practices advising NOT to embed SQL I\'m having a hard time changing paradigms.

Why

Answer 1

You need to think of LINQ to SQL as an abstraction above writing SQL directly yourself. If you can get your head around this then you’ve made a step in the right direction. You also need to let go of some long held beliefs such as compiled sprocs are always faster and SQL accounts shouldn’t have data reader / writer privileges.

I’ve found that it’s possible to begin gradually moving existing solutions towards LINQ to SQL so long as there is a clear DAL in place and you’re just changing the implementation without affecting the contract it may have with consuming code. Reference lists are an easy candidate as they’re low impact, read only sets of data. The main thing you need to remain conscious of if retrofitting is potential ambiguous class names if you’ve already hand coded them to model the database.

With the value of hindsight in bringing LINQ to SQL into a large enterprise (since CTP days), I’d do it again in a heartbeat. It’s not perfect and there are issues but there are enormous benefits particularly when it comes to development speed and maintainability. It’s a new paradigm and is definitely, definitely a step forward.