I'm a bit late to the game and have decided to spend some spare time learning LINQ. As an exercise, I'm going to rewrite a WebForms app in MVC 2 (which is also new to me). I managed to find a few topics regarding LINQ here (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16322/learning-about-linq, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8050/beginners-guide-to-linq, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/252683/is-linq-to-sql-doa), which brought the concern of Entities vs SQL to my attention.

The threads are all over a year old however, and I can't seem to find any definitive information on which ORM is preferable. Is Entities more or less LINQ to SQL 2.0 at this point? Is it still more difficult to use?

Is there any reason to use LINQ to SQL, or should I just jump into Entities? The applications I write at my present employer have a lengthy lifecycle (~10 years), so I'm trying to pick the best technology available.