I frickin' love LINQ. I was talking to my officemate about it and I think she was in the mindset that a lot of people are in, in equating LINQ to some kind of SQL replacement. Yeah it can do that but LINQ is more than that. LINQ is about like AJAX in that it's an amalgam of different technologies coming together. Lambda expressions, extension methods, and anonymous types are the key things I dig about LINQ. You can use these things in ways beyond querying a SQL database. Lambda expressions are by far the coolest thing to me! In case you don't know about them they're basically automatic / anonymous delegates. For example if you wanted to use the Find method from the List<> class you would have to pass it a delegate that described what it was you were searching for. Now with lambda expressions you can just pass something like this s => s == "red". No formal delegate type construction or anything but that's what happens behind the scenes. You can also kind of see how the where clause functionality of LINQ gets implemented.

As for mapping entities to your database objects I think it's a cool thing. It's an evolution over using typed datasets from previous versions of Visual Studio. I still use stored procedures to send and retrieve data from the database, only now I'm mapping the result columns to object properties instead of...typed dataset properties. When you look at it from that perspective it's not so different from typed datasets I guess. But once I get the collection of data from the database it is easier to work with it with LINQ than without.