I have been coding in .NET since it was introduced. While these are nice improvements for the .NET platform overall, I cringe at how much more code you have to write to do simple things compared to langues like Ruby and Python.
True. With such a good IDE, I don't mind the verbosity, but I can certainly see why some people do.
Linq, on the other hand, does quite a bit do reduce the amount of code you have to write to work with collections. I've just started using it in the last 6 months or so. Me gusta.