Last week, I attended the MySQL conference in Santa Clara and delivered a presentation on ADO.NET 2.0.  It was great to talk to developers building applications targeting MySQL databases via ADO.NET.  One developer stayed after my session to comment on how pleased he was to see the changes to the provider model in 2.0 and was even more excited to hear that the Entity Framework would let him focus on writing queries against his model rather than having to think about the query syntax for his back end of choice for string concatenations, etc.  Speaking of the Entity Framework, the highlight of the conference for me was attending Reggie Burnett's talk about MySQL and the future of ADO.NET where he demonstrated using an early build of the MySQL provider and the Entity Framework to access MySQL data via both LINQ to Entities and Entity SQL.  Here are links to the Reggie's session abstract and to Reggie's blog.