Evidently the VB team has thrown in the towel on the Select..From vs. From..Select battle. (See http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2006/05/05/11918.aspx). Personally, I have no problems with this change. It makes sense in terms of the order of evaluation of the extension methods anyway. Additionally, typing Select then completing the From clause and then coming back to the select clause seemed fairly clunky. Each time I presented it, I was only greeted with quizzical stares.

It seemed that a possible option would be to allow either the Select..From or From..Select syntax. The real trick is in the compiler which translates the query syntax into the Extension methods. So long as the compiler could handle either version, it would seem that we could have had our cake and eaten it also. Handling intellisense inside of the IDE would still prove problematic.

The other challenge I can see here is the one brought up by Eric Meijer at PDC who observes that it is easer when code-reading/maintenance, that we see the select portion first as we are more concerned with what we are getting than how we are getting it. Perhaps a code coloring scheme could be adopted to highlight that portion of the code.

One thing that still remains here is the fact that the teams are still looking for feedback on the direction of the LINQ project. If you don’t like the changes they are making, let them know. Don’t wait until the product release to complain or applaud the direction.

Now if we can only get the SQL Server team to see the light and switch the syntax to agree more with the order of evaluation of the SQL statements (which coincidently agrees with the From..Select ordering), we would be all set… to point our sights at changing the Oracle SQL syntax.