Is There A Future For Linq2SQL

Back in 2008 the ADO.Net team announced that moving forward new feature development would be focused towards the Entity Framework solution and not towards Linq2SQL. Given this kind of announcement you would expect developers to be abandoning the use of Linq2SQL. However, 2 years later in Scott Hanselman's poll of what tools developers are currently using Linq2Sql was twice as popular with developers.

From personal experience the popularity of Linq2SQL and the lack of adoption for EF is consistent. I know many who are using Linq2SQL happily, in production applications and have yet to meet anyone who is using the Entity Framework in production.

Fact is that Linq2Sql works and works well for many users. Linq2SQL, is still fully supported in .Net 4 so worst case scenario it may be depreciated in some later version of .Net but that is at least a few years out, it would still have to be supported due to the size of the userbase and by the time it is no longer supported there will likely be different choices in the ORM field to make a fresh decision with.

Kind of makes me wonder if the Entity Framework may become yet another vista or if over time the adoption rate will improve.