I've been discussing LINQ with some people and someone brought up a very interesting point. With LINQ->SQL you need to grant table-level access for developers to use the interesting features of LINQ, at least the time-saving ones from what I've seen.
Or do you?
Is there enough of a benefit from LINQ and the associated but different Entity Framework? Personally I'm not sure because I'm not a deep developer, though I did get to talk to a few of the LINQ guys at Microsoft.
From their perspective, developers spend a good portion of their time writing queries and processing result sets when they could be building more of the features in their application. LINQ -> SQL is supposed to greatly reduce that time, saving developers a tremendous amount of time. I'm not sure how much time the average developer spends on writing queries and mapping the object to relational, but I'd be curious to know what some of you in the real world think.
You can still build views to encapsulate some security, and table-valued functions might be the other way to integrate with LINQ and still keep some control over what developers can do, security-wise. I'm not convinced that LINQ is a step forwards, but I am leaning that way. It's certainly being pushed and I'm not sure we'll see that stop anytime soon. I've been told a lot of engineering work went into ensuring that LINQ -> SQL doesn't allow any SQL Injection vulnerabilities, which would potentially be a very large reason to consider LINQ.
In any case, I would really be interested in hearing what some of the developers out there think about it's benefits, especially in terms of how much more productive it makes you.
Steve Jones
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