I'm retrieving data without effort now.  The Linq syntax is starting to sink in.  I don't have to look at the reference as much anymore.  I think I'm stuck, though.  I'm trying to send updates back and I was hoping to have one method per entity called "Save" that would take in the modified entities and use Linq magic to get it back to the database.  No such magic seems to exist.  I'm going to have to write a method per operation (Delete, Insert, Update).  What stinks is that the work required to do this is about the same as it was before using traditional methods.

This could be a case of programming in a closet and not having anyone currently present to bounce ideas off of.  I'm going to bounce this off some of the developers when I go back to work tomorrow.

So far, Linq has a nice intuitive syntax and allows a standardized way of querying collections.  It's also nice that it supports lazy loading and relationships natively. However, from a productivity point of view, I'm not sure it adds a lot to what we currently have.