LINQ

A friend of mine just sent me a video link to a interview with Anders Hejlsberg talking about LINQ (Language INtegrated Query). Take Java's Hibernate ORM (object relational mapping), mix in contextual type inference and then throw in homogenous query syntax (that has a close resemblance to SQL) across relational databases, XML data and in-memory objects and you get an idea of what LINQ is all about. It sounds very ambitious (and it is) but Anders does a great demo. The comments section on the board makes it sound revolutionary but if you've been playing in the ORM space for any amount of time it seems like a very natural evolutionary step. But I didn't see the "type inference" stuff coming. That's brilliant. Makes the query stuff much more powerful.