Project Overview
LINQ to Umbraco was started with a goal of making the development of .NET components for Umbraco easier when trying to interact with items stored within the Umbraco content tree. LINQ to Umbraco spawned from the project The Umbraco Interaction Layer (http://uil.codeplex.com) but changed to focus from working within the Umbraco backend to the Umbraco frontend.
LINQ to Umbraco aims to bring the power of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) which was brought within the .NET 3.5 Framework to Umbraco, and maintain high performance.
It also aims to provide a way in which Umbraco DocTypes can be easily related back to .NET classes which the developer can then use.
Additionally LINQ to Umbraco aims to take Umbraco out of a web-based context to allow developers to use Umbraco more as a backend for data creation and storage and have a frontend which does not require a web context, allowing for thick clients to be built using Umbraco.
Long term project goals
The long term goals of the LINQ to Umbraco project is to have even more abstraction between the Umbraco data model and the Umbraco UI, ultimately producing a complete Data Provider model for Umbraco, using the generated DocType classes as proxies to any kind of custom data model required.
Release Schedule
LINQ to Umbraco will be included as part of the Umbraco 4.1 release and included in all future releases. For more information see the Roadmap wiki section.