This week at Mix 07, Shyam Pather and Sam Druker will present Microsoft Codename “Jasper”, an ADO.NET incubation project for building quick, clean and iterative applications! Building data-serving applications can be cumbersome and time consuming, requiring developers to create their own data layer, write queries, and then hook everything up to a UI. Using “Jasper”, developers start with a connection string and can immediately begin programming the core of an application. “Jasper” uses a set of new technologies to make this happen:

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·         Dynamic generation of data classes so there is no configuration or design time code-gen to carry around.

·         Rich query and O/R capabilities because “Jasper” is built on top of the Entity Framework.

·         Auto-binding capabilities for ASP.NET, WinForms, and WPF to make binding data to a UI simple and automatic.

So when it’s Friday afternoon and you are pressed to build a prototype for your company’s new message forum web app, it’s time for “Jasper”. You start by building your UI with a few pages for navigating categories and browsing and adding messages. Done, but only a half hour until the big game starts and it’s going to take forever to wire this to the database. Wrong. With “Jasper”, it’s done in a handful of lines of code. The data classes are available on-the-fly, there is no UI binding code to write, and you even have extra time to write a few reporting  pages using custom queries. Wow, nice job! You can see Shyam Pather do just this at Mix 07: “Rapidly Building Data Driven Web Pages with Dynamic ADO.NET".

For more information or to download the CTP, check out these sites:

·         Learn more about “Jasper” on the MSDN Data Access Incubation Projects site

·         Download the Jasper CTP

·         Team blogs

o   Andy Conrad's blog

o   Carl Perry's blog

o   Shyam Pather’s blog

o   The VB Team Blog

Jeff Derstadt

Software Design Engineer, Data Programmability