LINQ To SQL......Server 2005

I am programming a small application for our finance department, for which I wanted to use LINQ for performing the data access, using Visual Studio 2008 Professional.

Unfortunately -and no thanks to MSDN- I found out that currently there is only support for SQL Server 200x, and preferably SQL server 2005, and not every version of SQL Server 2005 at that.

Finance uses MS Access 2003. They already use the database, and it has some exotic connection to MFGPro, involving terminal windows and an FTP connection. So I am not going to move their stuff over to SQL Server 2005 at the moment because the app and the database have to work by the end of the year.

I really think this should have been documented properly. It seems that Microsoft does not want to outright say that they dropped Access from the supported databases list for LINQ. You can't even find a 'supported databases' list on the LINQ home page. According to a forum post by a Microsoft Employee, dropping Access was not a technical problem, but a matter of scheduling and other external factors. Yaaay.

But for now it might as well be named 'LINQ To SQL Server 2005'. I am curious if they will add support for Access later on. I wouldn't hold my breath though.

Back to ADO.NET for now, I guess.