It seems that the ADO.NET team has/going ( i'm not in LV ) to announce two on going projects which for all you LINQ enthusiastic people - if LINQ / DLINQ / XLINQ wasn't enough , here's another pile of paper work you'll have to read about [ that is if ADO.NET is your thing ;-) ].
Technology NO.1 is code name "Astoria" : "The goal of Microsoft Codename "Astoria" is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet.", or in plain english LINQ with partial WCF capabilities.
Check out the Astoria webpage at http://astoria.mslivelabs.com for more information and a link to the CTP download.
Pablo Castro has published this document which introduces the concepts and motivations for Astoria.
Technology NO.2 is code name "Jasper". Jasper seems to be like the level you'd get after SP2 of LINQ, why ?
Because "Jasper" uses a set of new technologies to make this happen:
- Dynamic generation of data classes so there is no configuration or design time code-gen to carry around.
- Rich query and O/R capabilities because "Jasper" is built on top of the Entity Framework.
- Auto-binding capabilities for ASP.NET, WinForms, and WPF to make binding data to a UI simple and automatic.
it's here boys and girls, the first SP to any edition of SQL 2005
which realy means that some one is realy using it , due to the fact that a Fix was released
so here it is .... SQL 2005 Express SP1
SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 Express Editions and Tools - Community Technology Preview (CTP) March 2006
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=57856CDD-DA9B-4AD0-9A8A-F193AE8410AD&displaylang=en#filelist