Foreword

It’s difficult for me to write this foreword, not because the road to LINQ was long and arduous or that I’m teary-eyed, wrought with emotion, or finding it difficult to compose just the right the words for a send-off worthy of a product that I’ve poured my very soul into. It’s difficult because I know that this is going to be a well-respected book and I’m finding it tricky to work in a punch line.

For me the LINQ project started years before anything official, back when I was involved in plotting and scheming over a new managed ADO. Back then, a few very smart developers had the audacity to suggest shucking off the chains of traditional data access APIs and designing around the ubiquity of objects and metadata that were fundamental to the new runtime—the Java runtime. Unfortunately, none of that happened. The traditionalists won, and at the time I was one of them. Yet what I gained from that experience was a perspective that data belongs at the heart of any programming system, not bolted on as an afterthought. It made sense that in a system based on objects, data should be objects too. But getting there was going to take overcoming a lot of challenges.