Microsoft has dropped the Entity Framework, which includes LINQ for Entities, from the .NET 3.5 and VS.NET “Orcas” release. The MSDN Data blog has an informative post on Microsoft’s Data Access Strategy, which spells out the differences between the Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL.

Frans has a theory on the motivation for this. I believe there was a lot of constructive criticism at the 2007 MVP Summit recently, and it seemed like the MS developers there were keen to address any issues the MVPs found. So maybe the reason is not just business-related as Frans’ speculates? Maybe they just want to get it right first go, instead of the usual MS approach of waiting until version 3 SP1 ;-).

Anyway, shame it is dropped from Orcas, but maybe it will give other ORM tools like NHibernate a chance to get some nice LINQ integration going in the meantime.