Microsoft has published some information about what we will see in future versions of the .Net Framework. One of the most interesting things in my opinion is the LINQ Project. It is an extension to the .Net Framework that will give developers some new language elements to create queries and such integrated in the native code. Instead of building a string containing an SQL statement, the query is constructed directly by code elements. Apparently it will work on any object that implements the IEnumerable interface, making it useful not only when working with databases.
You can read more about this on the LINQ Project web site.