A Conversation with
Erik Meijer and José Blakeley
interview
Photography by Craig Harrold

In any discussion about ORM (object-relational mapping), Microsoft’s approach is inevitably a part of the conversation. With LINQ (language-integrated query) and the Entity Framework, Microsoft divided its traditional ORM technology into two parts: one part that handles querying (LINQ) and one part that handles mapping (Entity Framework). To understand more about these technologies and why Microsoft took this approach, we invited two Microsoft engineers closely involved with their development, Erik Meijer and José Blakeley, to speak with Queue editorial board member Terry Coatta.

Meijer is an accomplished programming-language

The Microsoft

PERSPECTIVE

ON ORM

designer who has worked on a wide range of languages, such as Haskell, Mondrian, X#, C-Omega, C#, and Visual Basic (his

personal favorite). He runs the Data Programmability Languages Team at Microsoft, where his primary focus has been on removing the impedance mismatch between databases and programming languages. One of the fruits of these efforts is LINQ, which not only adds a native querying syntax to .NET languages such as C# and Visual Basic, but also allows developers to query data sources

ERIK

JOSÉ

References:

http://www.acmqueue.com

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