I have recently had the wonderful opportunity to play around with the LINQ technologies in ASP.Net 3.5. This little buddy is going to blow you away! For starters, just pulling and manipulating data from a SQL database has not only become easier (some Microsoft case studies have cited a 40% improvement in development time), but it has also become easier to read, find, and optimize. The LINQ technology even allows you to create a database from your existing class structure!

Obviously, new technologies are going to bring more and more excitement about the potential for reduced development time and increased productivity, but LINQ, when paired with the ADO.Net Entity Framework, will allow you to make ODBC calls to ANY datasource, not just XML, SQL, or Object collections in memory. If you want to stay on top of your programming game, or want to make development easier and more reliable, check out LINQ.