One of the points Faisal made in his post Coming soon to LINQ to SQL is that there will be support for the new types in SQL Server 2008 in the next release (SP1?).
It made me wonder if the LINQ to Entities and Entity SQL will gain these before Entity Framework is released?
One of the benefits of Entity SQL is that it in addition to the canonical functions that it supports (for all providers), it also support provider specific functions and provider primitive types. So for Entity SQL it’s a matter of getting the types into the data provider.
For LINQ to Entities, they also need to get it into the Entity Framework APIs. Perhaps they are doing that along with the LINQ to SQL update?
Note: Dont’ miss Danny Simmons’ reply in the comments!
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Yes, it is our intention that the Entity Framework will support new types in SQL Server 2008 before it ships.Unfortunately, it won’t be 100% complete support.We will support the new date/time types, and we will support filestreams in the same way we support blobs today.What won’t be supported are spatial types–these are modeled in SQL Server 2008 as well-known UDTs, and the EF won’t support UDTs in its first release.This is definitely something we will support in the future, just not yet.- Danny
Great info. Thanks Danny.