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
