It would appear that LINQ to SQL is running on a dead end track.
At PDC the announcement was made that no more investments in LINQ to SQL are made and the Entity Framework will absorb any features that LINQ to SQL has and that are worth preserving.
The following message from Tim Mallalieu says it all:
Is LINQ to SQL Dead?
We will continue make some investments in LINQ to SQL based on customer feedback. This post was about making our intentions for future innovation clear and to call out the fact that as of .NET 4.0, LINQ to Entities will be the recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios. As mentioned, we have been working on this decision for the last few months. When we made the decision, we felt that it was important to immediately to let the community know. We knew that being open about this would result in a lot of feedback from the community, but it was important to be transparent about what we are doing as early as possible. We want to get this information out to developers so that you know where we’re headed and can factor that in when you’re deciding how to build future applications on .NET. We also want to get your feedback on the key experiences in LINQ to SQL that we need to add in to LINQ to Entities in order to enable the same simple scenarios that brought you to use LINQ to SQL in the first place.