Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains can have profound differences in semantics, data types, and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today's applications is the result of these mismatches. The future "Orcas" release of Visual Studio aims to unify the programming models through integrated query capabilities in C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative API for manipulating and querying XML. This talk introduces each of these areas and walks through how they are related.

Erik Meijer is an Architect in the SQL Server group at Microsoft where he works with the C# and Visual Basic teams on simplifying programming against all forms of data, from fully structured to complete unstructured.