During the last PDC, I drooled over the announcements regarding C# 3 and LINQ.  Now we are one step closer. Yesterday, they released a new preview of those features that bind against the current version of the framework.

Skeptical language junkies* should take a gander at Don Box's latest post that attempts to explain what the big deal is. I agree with some of the people saying that the syntax really gets in the way (and I feel that way even more after spending alot of time in Ruby lately).  They need to add a language feature that indicates whether you want the lambda or the expression, then you can fall back on type inference to keep the typing to a minimum.

Overall, I couldn't be more giddy about the way integrated query works, and being able to get your hands dirty with it now is really awesome.  We're already working with data in this way in our APIs at work, so I've been able to experiment with the language and library features directly with some of our data and it's an absolute dream.  They should not wait for the next version of the framework to give us a go-live license for this.

Now, this kind of thinking needs to be applied to the web stack and MS could have a compelling alternative to Rails.

* That is, language junkies who are skeptical, not junkies of skeptical languages.