I'm looking at standardizing programming in an organisaiton. Half uses stored procedures and the other half Linq. From what i've read there is still some debate going on on this topic.

My concern is that MS is trying to slip in it's own proprietry query language 'linq' to make SQL redundant.

If a few years back microsoft had tried to win customers from oracle and sybase with their MSSQL database and stated that it didn't use SQL by their own proprietry query langues ie linq. I doubt many would have switched. I believe that is exactly what is happening now by introducting it into the applicaiton business layer.

I have used MS for many years but there is one gripe that I have with them and that is that they change their direction a lot. By a lot I mean new releases of .net, silverlight etc are more than 30% different from previous version. So by the time you become productive a new release is on the way.

As things stand now a web developer using .net would need to know either vb.net or c#, xml, xaml,javascript,html, sql and now linq. That doesn't make for good productivity in my books.

My concern is that once we all start using linq MS will start changing it between releases. and it will become an ever changing landscape. I believe that 'linq to sql' has already been deprecated. At leas with SQL we are dealing with a more stable and standardized language.

Are we looking at a programming revolution or a marketing campaign? As far as I know other languages like Cobol have stayed the same for years. A cobol program from 20 years ago could pick up todays code and start working on it. Could a Vb3 person work on a modern .net web app ? Would these large changes need to be made if the underlying original foundation had been sound ? I worry about following MS shaking roadmap with it's deadends and double backs. are there any architects out there who feel the same ?

regards

Josef