I thought that there wouldn't be much new stuff from the PDC in 2003 for the data side. Well I have just come out of the keynote and how wrong could I be.
What blew me away wasn't the 3D in vista or the simplicity of indigo, but the integrated query demo.
Integrated query is the ability to query data using constructs built into the .net language you use. This doesn't require the use of objects you just write a select statement just as you would write a foreach loop of switch statement. the things you can use in your query can be any object that supports ienumerable. To access a db you create a class that maps to a table in a database and select from that class.
so what’s the power. well you can query any in memory "collection" and join these together. I.e as was demoed today get the list of processes from system.processes. you can then join that to the description of processes stored in the db. wow that’s without writing one bit of sql.
this is all code named LINQ details can be found here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/default.aspxas kent
said. wow this got the biggest applause.
also mentioned
here