If you are a SharePoint developer, most probably you have heard about the LINQ to SharePoint project on CodePlex. You may have also tried it several times. Our company did that too, but after deeper investigations we decided to create our own LINQ implementation, LINQ4SP. Why?
Here you can find our reasons:

• Our architecture is built on design patterns and has a clean and easy maintainable structure. We make use of the visitor pattern by evaluating the LINQ expressions as is the case in other LINQ implementations. This reduces the code, simplifies the structure and creates an easy extendable solution.
• Our code generator operates SPWeb based, not SPSite based, so it’s not limited to the lists on the root web of every site collection.
• We make use of internal names instead of the display names, which makes it possible to alter the list definitions and wording as the end users whish, it will not crash the applications developed with this library.
• Support for all built in column types of SharePoint 2007 and plan to add support for custom fields too.
• This solution will be well and thoroughly tested, supported and further developed, because it’s already used in our everyday work in our running implementation projects.
• Our implementation has support for list item creation, altering and deletion.
• Our implementation has support for content types both in the code generator and in the query syntax. It’s possible to query list based on the assigned content types.
• Support for content type inheritance. This means: for example, you have content type A and B, where both inherit from C. If you have a list, where you only attach A and B to, you will still be able to query the list based on the common content type C.
• Support for special content types:
• Folders
• Documents
• Our implementation comes with an operation based context based (a separate context for every session)      

You can find a detailed feature-by-feature comparison in the following table.

 

So we are proud to announce the upcoming beta1 release of our LINQ4SP library. Are you interested?

Stay tuned!