It's an interesting area. I've worked with Microsoft tools and technologies since 1986, right through to today. LINQ and the Entity Framework are two technologi

It's an interesting area. I've worked with Microsoft tools and technologies since 1986, right through to today. LINQ and the Entity Framework are two technologies I avoid because they push me into a design paradigm that doesn't work for me. Try encrypting an object before saving it to a database. And then try saving that object to SQL Server and a service end point, using the same data access layer. Try loading 500k records using LINQ on a netbook. Sure, on Windows Phone I'm forced to use LINQ, and I've written some really crazy code to hide it from my app, but at least my app is fast.