the year of the LINQ

Back in the 90s, business seemed to fall in love with Microsoft Access. Homegrown applications were popping up everywhere and in the short-term they offered relief to business. IT could be slow in response, and an executive's admin could open MS Access and "develop an application" to support a business need by simply creating a couple of tables and dragging and dropping controls onto forms.

It was a quick and easy way to get the job done. These applications grew, and were shared, and eventually became relied upon to the point where they were business-critical.

These applications grew large enough that their poorly designed and developed systems failed. The lesson learned by most was that the MS Access application was good for a short-term fix or a small, personal project that would not expand in scale or scope.

This is not developer snobbery. It's simply a fact. Applications need to be designed and developed by experienced developers if you expect them to support large, business-critical needs. This is a lesson many learned in the past, and now we have the opportunity for history to repeat with the introduction of LINQ.

What is this blasphemy of which I speak? Surely LINQ is the next great development paradigm, no?

No.

Mind you, these are my first impressions of the technology, but you know what they say about first impressions.

Now with the addition of LINQ a "developer" can open Visual Studio, create tables in a database, use LINQ to create a data access layer without writing any code, then create forms and data consuming pages by simply dragging and dropping objects on a page. In minutes you can go from an idea for an application to pushing something out onto the servers for everybody to use without writing a bit of code nor contemplating design decisions.

Sounds like MS Access all over again.

So, all you consultants out there, don't ignore LINQ. Spend time learning it. LINQ will be great for prototyping. Better yet, it will also be a great revenue generator for you in 2009 or 2010. Ronstrodomous predicts you will undoubtedly be seeing a large number of projects rolling through begging you to fix a now business-critical LINQ-based application that Joe from accounting created in 2008.