ADO.NET vNext: The Entity Framework, LINQ and more
(this post was originally posted here)
Once you are done with shipping large products such as SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 you’d expect to have a quiet time for a while, slow down a bit, that kind of stuff…
Turns out that it wasn’t the case this time. Right after SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 were ready to ship (and actually even before they were completely done) we started to work hard on the next version of the data programming technologies; we worked on a broad vision that spans various releases and various technologies, and also specifically on how ADO.NET plays in that vision.
In the context of the vision for data programmability and ADO.NET, we decided that the next big step for ADO.NET was to move to a higher-level of abstraction. Connections, commands and readers are great for low-level stuff, but it’s not exactly what you want to be dealing with continuously when writing business logic. There are other aspects that are similarly “low level” and applications have to deal with, like the actual database schemas (e.g. did you even wonder why you have to do a 3-way join just to navigate a relationship between entities instead of just saying “traverse the relationship”?).
Now we’re making public our vision on data programmability, it’s a great read, I highly recommend it.
We’re also making public the specific plans for the next version of ADO.NET, a bit more technical, less formal, but with all the details of how we’re moving the technology forward and describes the ADO.NET Entity Framework, as well as the ADO.NET Entity Data Model (EDM).
The first of a series of Channel 9 videos has been posted - this one features Sam and Anders talking about Entities, LINQ and a few details about how all the stuff fits together.
Feedback on all of this stuff is welcome. I highly encourage folks to check out all of the content we’re putting out there and write us with your thoughts.
Pablo Castro
ADO.NET Technical Lead
Microsoft Corporation
