I finally had an opportunity to make a real life application with Linq, and I must sure the experience has been GREEEAAAAATT!!!

It's really something to go from using table adapters, TSQL code, to do all your queries to a simple syntax like

query=from authors in ctx.authors where authors.name.startswith("john") select authors

directly in my code to do selection. Why is it easier and how different is this from using typed data adapters? well the main difference is the speed at which you can make a new query.

With a typed data adapter you'd have to fiddle around with a designer to create your queries, slowing down developement time. With Linq, you just keep pounding away on the keyboard to build your data layer and queries, so the time for code to go "from brain to actual code" has decreased, thus improving developement time.

Either great, there are some developement choice changes that come with using Linq, and I'm still fiddling with it to see if it can be as flexible as a dataconnection in a pinch.