TechEd was a major success.  Every time I turned around, more people were asking questions about LINQ and the Entity Framework, though that might have had something to do with the fact that I was standing next to a sign that said "LINQ / Entity Framework".

One of the highlights was the provider writers' chalk talk, which packed the theater area.  I'd previously blogged that IBM, DataDirect and Oracle would be in attendance.  We also had representatives from Sybase and VistaDB at the talk.

IBM drew the most "oohs" and "aahs" when they demonstrated an early build of their provider working with the 101 LINQ to Entities samples.  Each provider writer took some time to talk about their thoughts on customer scenarios, the work they've done so far, etc.  The majority of the provider writers talked about how excited they were that both LINQ and Entity SQL allow developers to write provider agnostic queries without having to ask themselves questions like "How do I concatenate strings, construct a join, etc. in my database's query language?"

A few attendees asked about MySQL connectivity.  MySQL was unable to attend due to scheduling problems but they are still very much involved. As I mentioned in a previous post, they demonstrated an early build of their provider working with the Entity Framework at the MySQL conference in April.

If you're writing an ADO.NET provider for the Entity Framework and you're not already in touch with me, please drop me a line at David (dot) Sceppa (at) microsoft (dot) com.