Mr. Softwarepants

The more I think about LINQ in C# 3.0, the more it seems like a (probably) very fun academic excercise for Microsoft's language researchers, less useful than it seems in practice, and utterly abused in the wild.

How many times do you actually use, or want to use, raw SQL in your .NET application? Like, in your client tier. You're probably going against a set of stored procedures. Or ought to be. And if you reall want query ad hockery, what you probably want is a reporting package of some kind.

So what about for XML queries? Maybe useful. I dunno what the state of the art in XML querying is these days.

The examples given for LINQ remind me a lot of BiMonSciFiCon:
Featuring Mark Hammil (SQL), ALF (XML)... and many others (unspecified! Sure to disappoint!)

More: JAR: The "Excitement" of LINQ

Coding Horror: Sometimes a Word is Worth a Thousand Icons

I think the work project is starting to get too busy, thanks to icons. And it's all my fault. A few of the icons actually convey useful information. Most of the rest... probably don't. And I'm not sure what to do about it, because I really don't want to go for that "sea of Battleship Grey" look.