One of the big gains in LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is that is saves a lot of developer time. If you really look at costs, the developer salaries (and related expenses) far outweigh all other costs in building software, whether this is shrink wrap or corporate software, and anything you can do to speed up the pace of development is very valuable.
After all, the cost of labor, meaning DBA or developer time, usually far outweighs the cost of the software, even when you're licensing Microsoft's products. If you don't believe me, do the math sometime on one of your applications and figure out the portion of salaries for DBAs, developers, support people, etc. and see what you find out.
So for this Friday's poll:
How much of your time is spent writing data access or manipulation code?
It could be data access, updates, etc., but I'm wondering about LINQ and how much time it really saves you? Is it a good long term time saver? Is it valuable only in the bootstrap phase where you are learning the data model and getting your own framework in place for data access?
I've heard that the writing of SQL takes significant time as well and I don't have a good frame of reference for how much time developers spend on this. When I've worked with developers, I never thought that it was that much time. They had routines to plug in a stored procedure name, or a DAL to use, and those didn't take much time to construct. They were reused over and over. Routines existed for consuming data, and while you had to tweak those to handle the different types of results you got, I'm not sure that it was overly time consuming.
But I'd like to know what you think, especially those of you that have played with LINQ.
Steve Jones
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