by oising
12. June 2007 14:36
I like to see myself as a competent SharePoint developer having worked with it since beta 1 on various large scale projects, but it always bothered me that there were large swathes of it on which I was no expert, primarily due to one thing: CAML. It disgusts me - in fact, my brain downright rejects it. Every time I have to create some markup for a simple SPQuery, I have to look pull out the SDK reference material. CAML for me symbolizes everything bad that came out of the 1998-2001 "XML revolution," where absolutely everything had to be xml/xslt driven, where all wisdom concerning the separation of presentation and data disappeared in a puff of <smoke />.
It's not often that you see a new technology and you just "get it." No thinking required; instant grokkage. I thought I "got" LINQ, but it wasn't until today that I truely got it. So, I'm not sure if this qualifies as a "straw" as per the metaphor used in the title, perhaps a full-on hulking haybale would be more apt. Enter Bart de Smet's savegely impressive LINQ to SharePoint project on CodePlex. No more of the nausea-inducing verbosity that is CAML; just plain old C# 3.0.