I was reading Frans’ post on the marketing hype around Entity Framework this morning. He left an interesting comment there, quoting Matt Warren’s post on writing an extensible LINQ to SQL DataContext. Here’s a snippet from Matt’s original post (emphasis mine):

“If only LINQ to SQL had a public provider model, I could simply plug a new one in and use it to intercept all interaction with the database. Oh, double irony, as there is no such provider model, at least not a public one. Grin.

LINQ to SQL was actually designed to be host to more types of back-ends than just SQL server. It had a provider model targeted for RTM, but was disabled before the release. Don’t ask me why. Be satisfied to know that is was not a technical reason. Internally, it still behaves that way.”

Cue conspiracy theories! :)