LINQ is not going anywhere but the LINQ to XML will be dependent on people using it and giving feedback to Microsoft because XML is in ANSI without basic relevant math, so Microsoft is implementing only as needed. This is one place I agree with Microsoft so the problem is not Microsoft be rather politics in standards. If you implement it and run into issues you could migrate it to the Entity Framework, the only base requirement if I remember correctly is to use Views instead of stored procedures. Check the docs for the current requirements so you could just swap out Data Access as needed.