I read somewhere on the 'net that Microsoft is considering moving away from LINQ-To-SQL in its current form as it wasn't very successful.
I want as many opinions on this as possible as I'm new to .NET and want to choose the best possible route for where I work.
No, not LINQ per se. The "Language Integrated Query" is here to stay.
There's some talk about MS giving up on "Linq-to-SQL" (the SQLServer-only database version of LINQ) in favour of the ADO.NET Entity Framework, but even that's still a bit unclear.
See this post in the MS ADO.NET team blog and these comments here by Oren Eini and David Hayden.
And while I think Linq-To-Sql probably won't receive big updates anymore, I highly doubt it'll be physically removed from the product, so there's always opportunity for third-party developers to step in and make it great nonetheless!
Not exactly "scrapped", but MS is moving on to the next big thing.
Also, don't confuse linq-to-sql with linq-to-objects, lambda expressions, or the IEnumerable extension methods. Those aren't going anywhere.
Heres another SO thread that talks about this. They're not getting rid of LINQ, just Linq-To-SQL I believe.
LINQ is not getting scrapped, but Linq to SQL probably is: It looks like it will be superseded by the Entity Framework.
I assume that that will take some time, though I'd expect that MS will at least provide some migration tools to move from L2S to EF.
I think it's extremely unlikely that MS would move away from supporting LINQ. I'm curious where you heard it "wasn't very successful"... by all accounts I've seen LINQ is considered the best addition to .NET since generics.
For that matter, it doesn't "cost" anything to continue to support it regardless of how much it's used. LINQ and its associated technologies (SQL, Entities, XML, etc) are here to stay.
Here's an MSDN blog entry pretty much hinting that Microsoft is preferring LINQ to Entities above LINQ to SQL, but no mention of scrapping LINQ altogether.
LINQ will stay in the .Net-Framework since it's a very powerfull and popular Addition. But Microsoft announced to concentrate into the development of the Entity Framework. This will make the LINQ-TO-SQL-PROVIDER obsolete. But you can use LINQ to query data out of EF-objects, of course.
So I recommend you to take a closer look into the possibilities of LINQ, since it made Dataqueries to all sorts of lists a lot easier and faster (for me).