Interested in C-omega? LINQ finally announced!

Ever since I started planning for my users-group talk (and wrote this blog entry) about data access with C-omega, I've been dying to tell everyone about the plans to add similar functionality to C#.  For those of you at my talk, you'll remember this video of Anders which alluded to the work that was being done here.  Well, today at the PDC, project LINQ (formerly "Clarity", etc.) was publicly announced.  In a nutshell, C# 3.0 (and VB 9.0) will add fundamental support for seamlessly working with data, which includes several core language enhancements that are generally useful (such as type inference).  Functional programming language fans (such as myself) should find the design especially appealing.  See the LINQ website for details.

This is definitely the one thing I'm most excited about in the Orcas (3.0) release.  Not only is it cool for programming-language theory fans, but it also has the potential to significantly improve the productivity of a typical enterprise developer.