There seems to be alot of haters out their for this concept. Everyone claims that LINQ to Entities is the way to go in the future. I don't have enough experience with LINQ to Entities to make a solid argument at this time.
What I do know is I have been using LINQ in both MVC and Web Form projects for the past 18 months and do not want to go back to ADO. Using a ORM tool like LINQ makes starting up projects super fast. Most projects these days are small in size anyway starting out and LINQ just makes those so easy. If the software is a success and grows then we can look at something else. That something else might still be LINQ for me though. Tools like
PLINQO from
Code Smith show hope for LINQ as a true DAL in big projects. I am evaluating it now for my next big project.
I went looking for a drop down list for Countries in ASP.NET MVC. I found this article http://helios.ca/2009/05/30/aspnet-mvc-cascading-dropdownlist-with-jquery/ which was pretty much what I needed.
I did not need the state drop down for my application at this time though. Also his sample did not actually provide the countries so some extra work was needed.
I thought I would share here as I beleive other people might be looking for those countries also. I am not going over the implementation here, if you want that then go read Mike's Blog
Here is a zip with the Countries defined in it.
CountryCSharpClass.zip
Enjoy! and thanks to Mike for sharing.
Chris