Is Linq really such a good idea? Are SQL Strings inside C# really such a bad idea?

Today, a friend at work asked me a question "how to sort in a stored procedure?" Of course there is a simple answer:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[Sorter]()

AS

SELECT * FROM Table ORDER BY Field

 

But... what if you want to order by any field of the table? That is a "dynamic order by"... well then:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[Sorter](@SortOrder tinyint = NULL

AS

SELECT Field1, Field2, Field3 FROM Customers ORDER BY CASE WHEN @SortOrder = 1 THEN Field1 WHEN @SortOrder = 2 THEN Field2 ELSE Field3 END

Great!... well not that much, because it only works as expected if all 3 fields are of the same type (of course we could convert them all to string... I mean "nchar")

My friend has all this problems because he is trying to avoid the dynamic slq approach (either creating his own dynamic sql generator, or using any of the available ORMs)

But this post is about LINQ... with LINQ, we will have relational extensions right there inside C#... that means no more language mixing (SQL inside strings inside C#)... but that also means... no more dynamic manipulation of SQL (AFAIK C# can not manipulate C# as a string, they way it does with SQL)... So... will LINQ really simplify development of data manipulation applications? or will it complicate it more by preventing us from easly and dinamically manipulate queries ? or is this just an SQL limitation (maybe SQL should allow as to have parametrized sorting?)?

I guess I'll have to do more research...