Data : ADO.NET

Data + XML + “Oslo” = “It’s All Data” (the new Data Developer Center)

dmgblogs — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:05:00 GMT

After some months of planning and execution, we’re delighted to present you with the newly redesigned and expanded Data Developer Center on MSDN!

The expanded part here comes from the fact that the Data DevCenter is now home to what used to be two other separate centers, XML and “Oslo”. Actually, the XML DevCenter already joined with Data back in early October more or less intact. The former “Oslo” site, on the other hand, has merged with Data as of PDC 2009, a natural result of “Oslo” becoming SQL Server Modeling and taking a clear place within the larger ecosystem of data development technologies.

The redesign part then really came up as the natural result of this merging. Back in early July, Elisa Flasko (the owner of the Data DevCenter at that time) and myself (owner of the “Oslo” DevCenter) started to explore how best to present all the diverse technologies that we’d be supporting on the merged DevCenter.

The challenges were immediately apparent, as were the opportunities implicit in the solutions to those challenges. For one, the Data and XML DevCenters were very much oriented around currently shipping technologies, as well as ones with a multi-version history. SQL Server Modeling/“Oslo”, on the other hand, was 100% pre-release. But that gave us the clear opportunity to ground our presentation of SQL Server Modeling in the context of the most recently data technologies, like the ADO.NET Entity Framework, as well as the entire arc of data development technologies over the last two decades.

Second was the need to answer a perennial question: with all these different data development technologies, which one do you use for what purpose, and when? It’s a question I’ve been hearing over and over from developers, one that stems from the undeniable fact that after twenty-five years or so, Microsoft’s overall development platform is just plain big. Very, very big! The opportunity, then, was to start exploring ways to help you—the developers who live and breathe MSDN—navigate your way through that bigness, by leading you through distinct steps that quickly reduce the overall surface area of what you need to think about and understand. What we’ve done on the Data DevCenter, which I’ll discuss more in a moment, is our first step.

The third major challenge was to create a DevCenter structure that could continue to support the healthy developer communities that have grown up around the individual technologies while at the same time encourage the growth of an “It’s All Data” community. The opportunity here was to think beyond just having a single community stage—that is, a single aggregation of data-related community blogs—to create “mini-DevCenters” for main individual technologies along with really a “best of” aggregation on the Data DevCenter home page.

And, of course, we had the challenge to do all this in time for PDC 2009, especially with the redesign of MSDN itself in mid-October that had serious implications where page layout was concerned. But truly, this was an opportunity both to keep ourselves focused and to reevaluate (by necessity!) how we utilized your screen real-estate.

Whew!

Well, we hope that the new Data Developer Center has met these challenges and created a framework upon which we can grow.

Now if you want to continue reading, the sections that follow go into a little more detail about what you’ll find on the site. But of course you’re wholly invited to just go there yourself and start exploring!

The Home, Community, and Support Pages

Upon visiting the site, you’ll see that the home page is designed to help you find your place in the overall data technology stack. Instead of a flat list of technologies, which assumes you already know what they’re used for, we’ve grouped them into .NET technologies, “native” (e.g. Win32) technologies, and the ever-available “future stuff” bucket, with direct, one-sentence descriptions. I also wanted to illustrate—literally, with diagrams—how the technologies within these groups relate to one another, a real act of self-discipline for one who loves to wordsmith. Thus was born the short Data Development Technologies At-a-Glance article (as well as individuals At-a-Glance topics for Entity Framework and Data Services). As an expanded version, I also wanted to understand and illustrate how all these technologies developed over time, which you’ll find in Data Development Technologies: Past, Present, and Future. (My associates have described this as a real “archeological job,” for which I’m grateful to whoever ditched an old 1999 copy of Inside SQL Server 7.0 in one of the Microsoft mailrooms!)

We’re also happy to offer the much more detailed piece by Bob Beauchmin, Guide to the Data Development Platform for .NET Developers, as well as our Top Ten Questions & Answers on Data.

Farther down the home page you’ll also find aggregations of our top team and community blogs—those we’ve hand-picked to feature—while on the main Community page you’ll find aggregations of all the blogs we monitor. The main Community page is also home to training partners, an index of user groups, and the best data development books and community sites.

And we should mention too that the main Support page is also an all-up gateway to all the different data development MSDN forums and the data development Connect sites.

The Learn Page

The main Learn page now is the one that we consider of top importance, second only to the home page. It’s really here that we hope newcomers will land when they really want to know what they should be investigating more deeply.

What we’ve done on this page then, after providing links again to the At-a-Glance, Past/Present/Future, and Guide for .NET Developer articles, is offer the Selection Guide section. This contains a decision tree based on four initial choices: Application Type, Release Timeframe, Storage Technology, and Learning Type. Each of these leads you into a second level of choices that finally present a list of those specific technologies that are really applicable to the choices you’ve made. Because we’ve invested quite a bit of thought into this guide, we’d really love to hear what you think!

Below the selection guide we continue to present the list of technologies we support on the Data DevCenter, organized into Current and Future columns. And rounding out the Learn page is a group of Learning Type links that will take you off to index pages for documentation, videos (shipping and pre-release), articles, samples, books, and more!

Individual Technology Pages (Mini-DevCenters)

Now when you’re on either the home page or the Learn page and click on the name of a technology, you’ll go to another page that helps you dive more deeply into that technology. In some cases, especially with the most mature technologies, those secondary pages are static. In others, especially the most recent and future technologies for which there is significant community buzz, we’ve creating something of the look-and-feel of a separate DevCenter.

For shipping technologies, specifically Data Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework, these technology pages give you quick links to the necessary downloads, a sequenced Beginner’s Guide, a detailed Resources & Community page, and a futures page. Here you’ll also see technology-specific highlight along with team and community blog aggregations.

Those blog aggregations are repeated on the Resources & Community pages for the individual teachnologies, where you’ll also find feeds for the latest videos, articles, forum posts, and Connect feedback, along with links to samples, MSDN library content, product documentation, related technologies, and available hands-on-labs. In short, we designed these each of these Resources & Community pages to be the place where you’ll be spending most of your time once you are actively working with any given technology.

We’re doing a similar thing with pre-release technologies, such as those in the SQL Server Modeling CTP: the “M” language, “Quadrant”, and SQL Server Modeling Services. In these cases we don’t have a separate Beginner’s Guide or—obviously—a “futures” page, because all of that is really folded into the individual Resources & Community pages.

What’s to Come

Well, the first thing I can think of, after writing everything to this point, is that I should sit down and do a video tour of the DevCenter! But as you might expect, many of us are going to be taking some well-deserved vacation after PDC…I, for one, am planning to hit the already-open ski slopes of Mount Hood outside Portland, Oregon, where I live. So I can’t promise a video right away.

What we’ll be doing in the months ahead is really working to deliver new content for the various sections of the Data DevCenter as appropriate for the lifecycle stage of the individual technologies. For example, the Data Services and Entity Framework teams are ramping up their content plans in preparation for the imminent release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. With a new SQL Server Modeling CTP just out the door, there are many good content opportunities to pursue there as well.

So watch all those feeds we’ve dropped around the DevCenter, and more than that, do take the time to tell us what you think of this redesign, the Selection Guide on the Learn page, blogs you’d like to see included in our aggregations, and really anything else you can think of (including any glitches you see). “It’s All Data,” sure, but it’s really all about serving you, to help you have the greatest successes you can—and enjoyment!—with Microsoft’s data development technologies. To this goal I and the rest of our whole Community team are completely committed.

You can reach us through dpfback (at) microsoft.com.

Kraig Brockschmidt
Community Program Manager for the Data Developer Center

Announcing Entity Framework & ADO.NET Data Services RTM!

dpblogs — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:11:00 GMT

Announcing Entity Framework & ADO.NET Data Services RTM!

We are excited to announce the RTM of the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, including the RTM of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which raise the level of abstraction for database programming and supply both a new model-based paradigm and a rich, standards-based framework for creating data-oriented Web services. With this service pack, Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 also support SQL Server 2008, making the Microsoft platform the most comprehensive environment for database application development.

“The ASP.NET AJAX improvements and new capabilities like ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services meant we didn’t have to worry about any of the underlying plumbing and could simply focus on building a highly responsive and interactive experience for users,” says Galen Murdock, President and CEO at Veracity Solutions. (Link to Official Press Release)

For more information or to download check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/data

Elisa Flasko
Program Manager, Data Programmability

Announcing Project Codename "Velocity"

dpblogs — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:53:00 GMT

The advances in processors, memory, storage, and connectivity have paved the way for next-generation applications that are data-driven, whose data could reside anywhere (i.e. on the desktops, mobile devices, servers, and in the cloud) and that require access from anywhere (i.e. local, remote, over the network, from mobile devices, in connected and disconnected mode). This trend has led to the development of distributed, multi-tiered, and composite application architectures for the web and for the enterprise. A typical enterprise application accesses data from multiple data sources, integrates that data, re-shapes (or transforms) that data into a form most suitable for the application (typically into object form like C# or Java object), and writes application logic. The same is true of web applications – consider social networking apps or mashups – they access data from multiple web sources, over the internet, aggregate it, execute application logic, and generate pages for web interaction. As these styles of multi-tiered web and enterprise application are becoming main stream, the demand for application performance and scale is increasing. End users become less tolerant and more frustrated when a web application cannot respond in milliseconds; web applications that cannot scale, as the number of concurrent accesses increase, lose traffic and thereby business. Fundamentally, we have all begun to expect high performance and scale from every application. And let’s not forget application availability. For similar reasons to those I describe above, an application cannot be down. We cannot imagine the MSN portal or the Amazon web site, or the corporate SAP financial application being down when we need it. We expect to access our personal information on MSN at any time; consumers do business with Amazon at any time and from anywhere. Fundamentally, applications need to be available all the time to support access at any time, and from anywhere. Another major expectation, especially from application developers and from application hosters is that of scalable and available applications at a low cost. A decade ago, only mission-critical businesses could afford to invest in large and expensive infrastructure (both hardware and software) to support scale and availability of their applications. But, now with web hosting, everyone expects and demands high scale and availability at low cost. Extending this even further, not only developers want cheap scalable and available applications, they want the ability to develop (and deploy) such applications very rapidly.

To cope with competitive pressure, both from an innovation and a deployment perspective, rapid development and deployment of these applications is critical for application vendors. In turn, application developers are looking for application infrastructure that enables them to build highly performant, scalable, and available applications using commodity hardware and software, at a rapid pace. Traditional application platforms like the .NET and Java platforms, which are known for rapid multi-tier application development and deployment, are required to provide the scalability and availability infrastructure.

Distributed cache is becoming the key application platform component for providing scalability and high availability. In-memory caching has been traditionally used primarily for meeting the high performance requirements of applications. By fusing caches on multiple nodes into a single unified cache however, the distributed caches offer not only high performance, but also scale. By maintaining copies of data on multiple cache nodes (in a mutually consistent manner), the distributed cache can also offer high availability to applications. Distributed caches are especially ideal for applications with the following characteristics:

There is a considerable number of data requests that are mostly read (e.g. product catalogs)
- Large concurrent access to such data can be provided by replicating the catalog data on multiple cache nodes. Since updates are infrequent to such data, maintaining consistency (synchronously or asynchronously) is not very expensive
Applications that can tolerate some staleness of data
- Such applications can provide better performance and scale by not requiring immediate updates ore refreshing of caches
Applications that can work with highly partitioned data (e.g. session data, shopping cart)
- High scale and performance can be supported by partitioning and distributing data across multiple cache nodes, and thereby distributing data processing across the cache nodes
Applications that can work well with eventual consistency
- Consider a flight inventory application, which must satisfy a large number of concurrent read/writes to the inventory of seats. To support large scale, the distributed cache may replicate the inventory value on multiple nodes; however, the inventory values on different nodes have to be made consistent in some fashion. Requiring immediate (also known as strong) consistency will require updates to be synchronously propagated to all the copies. Such action would impact the overall performance and scale of the application. However, instead of immediately making the copies consistent, allowing them to eventually (in an asynchronous manner) become consistent will provide low latency, high performance access to inventory.

As distributed caches become more widely deployed, I believe over the next few years, distributed cache will be used as the first tier of all data access. Multi-tier application architecture will include the cache tier as a data access tier between the application server tier and the backend data tier.

Today, Microsoft is announcing the first CTP of a distributed caching product to provide the .NET application platform support for developing highly performant, scalable, and highly available applications. The project code named “Velocity” is a distributed cache that allows any type of data (CLR object, XML document, or binary data) to be cached. “Velocity” fuses large numbers of cache nodes in a cluster into a single unified cache and provides transparent access to cache items from any client connected to the cluster. The Data Platform Developer Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/data and the Velocity Team Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/velocity provides additional information about project code named “Velocity” as well as links to download our first CTP.

Distributed caches are not new – during the last couple of years several caching products have emerged to address the performance and scalability needs of applications. Most of these products are point products, primarily supporting key-based access. Other than memcached, which is an open source technology, most others target enterprises and enterprise workloads and scale. I think the web workloads require considerably large scale, with 1000s of cache nodes in a cluster. The web scale distributed caches not only require mechanisms that can scale and provide availability in very large clusters, they must be easy to manage or self-managed. In the Future, “Velocity” envisions being an integral part of the .NET application stack targeting both enterprise and web workloads (and scale). As applications start using the caches for data access, I also believe, they will demand richer data services like query, transactions, analytics, synchronization etc. For example, we believe .NET applications will require LINQ queries on the distributed cache, the same way they query the backend SQL Server database. We envision “Velocity” becoming such a comprehensive distributed caching platform. The performance, scale, and availability functionality of “Velocity” along with its rich data services will allow for rich web and enterprise applications development and deployment.

Anil Nori
Microsoft Distinguished Engineer

Interested in working on the ADO.NET Data Services Framework (aka "Astoria") or XML?

elisaj — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:13:00 GMT

Do you want to work on the next generation of data access APIs for the web? If so, the Astoria and XML teams are hiring. If you want to get a feel for the types of problems our team thinks about the solutions we build, check out the earlier posts on this blog as well as

http://msdn.microsoft.com/data and http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml

We have a range of job openings across disciplines (Development, Developer in Test and Program Management) available on the Astoria and XML teams. If you are interested in any of these positions, please send myself (mike.flasko@microsoft.com) and Andy Conrad (aconrad@microsoft.com) email.

For more details on each of the open positions, please see:

ADO.NET Data Services PM

XML PM

ADO.NET Data Services SDE

XML SDE

ADO.NET Data Services SDE/T

XML SDE/T

We look forward to talking with you...

Thanks,

Mike Flasko : ADO.NET Data Services ("Astoria"), Program Manager

Entity Framework & Data Services Available in VS2008 SP1 Beta

dpblogs — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:30:00 GMT

We are very excited about .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and what this update means for developers who use ADO.NET for data development. This beta marks the entry of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services (aka project Astoria) as part of the overall .NET/Visual Studio beta install. This public release is also the final beta before the RTM of these two technologies. In addition, we have a revision of LINQ to SQL that introduces the new date time functions for SQL Server 2008.

In the space of a few short months developers have been able to experience a wave of innovation in the .NET data programming space. We began with the introduction of LINQ in .NET Framework 3.5 for providing a compile time query experience over in-memory objects, XML and relational data, and now we’re adding the Entity Framework runtime and graphical entity designer into the mix. The Entity Framework extends the reach of ADO.NET, providing a new data model that will be the foundation for a range of data services moving forward. We’ve also enhanced the common ADO.NET provider model enabling a LINQ programming experience against 3^rd party databases. The Entity Framework designer in Visual Studio works with 3^rd party databases as well and enables developers to visualize the data model being used by the application.

Over the last year or so we’ve seen a growing trend in the way people build services. They tend to either be operation-centric with a focus on actions occurring on either side or they are resource-centric, where the focus is on working with the data or resource on either side. For operation-centric services the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow (WF) teams have done a bunch of work in .NET 3.5 to make it easier to build these action oriented service interfaces as a workflow. On the data-centric side, the Data Programmability team has been working with the WCF team to deliver ADO.NET Data Services. This is one of the most exciting new additions to the platform in some time, providing the foundation for building the next generation of data-driven applications and services today. These data services build on the WCF classes to provide an end-to-end experience for building data-centric REST based services in .NET. They have a REST based query model, a means of exchanging metadata (in terms of the Entity Data Model) and client and mid-tier API’s that let people build rich data services and clients in a way that is easier than ever before. Developers can start with the Entity Framework and expose relational data via the Data Services Framework, they can expose non-relational data using a custom provider, or they can use some of the existing services that already expose these protocols.

· Live App Storage

· Live Spaces Photos

In summary, it is an exciting time to be working with data on the .NET platform. The team is looking forward to your feedback. We invite you all to download this beta and start using these technologies today.

Sam Druker

General Manager, Data Programmability

Connecting to Pre-Release Versions of SQL Server 2008 – Part Deux

dpblogs — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:26:00 GMT

Since posting on the topic of design-time and runtime connectivity to pre-release versions of SQL Server 2008 on the Data blog in November, the set of affected clients (applications, runtimes, and operating systems) have been officially released: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5, Microsoft Vista Service Pack 1, and Microsoft Windows 2008. Runtime connectivity from a client system configured with any of these released products to SQL Server 2008 November CTP or later provides full runtime access to the following features (for design-time functionality, see below):

· Table-Valued Parameters

· New date/time data types

· Large user-defined types

· Support for very large FILESTREAM-attributed column data

Design-Time Connectivity Between Visual Studio and SQL Server 2008

Developers using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 design tools will receive an error when trying to open a database on any pre-release instance of SQL Server 2008 without installing a Visual Studio patch. Pre-release patches for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 enable the following Visual Studio functionality for SQL Server 2008:

· Server Explorer successfully connects to SQL Server 2008, and database objects such as stored procedures and table data can be viewed and edited.

o Note that table schemas still cannot be viewed or edited in this release.

· SQL CLR projects that target SQL Server 2008 can be created and deployed to the server.

· T-SQL and SQL CLR debugging are now enabled for SQL Server 2008.

· Data binding features in Client and Web Projects are enabled.

Pre-release versions of the design-time patches are currently available: the Visual Studio 2008 CTP patch is available for download here and the Visual Studio 2005 CTP patch is available for download here. Final versions of the patches will be available in the near future. For more information please see the "Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008" whitepaper on MSDN.

Debra Dove

Program Manager Lead, Data Programmability

ADO.NET Data Services CTP Released!

dpblogs — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:46:00 GMT

The December CTP of ADO.NET Data Services (also known as Project Astoria) has been Released! You can download the CTP here as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview release.

For more information on ADO.NET Data Services check out http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/default.aspx .

Elisa Flasko
Program Manager, Data Programmability

ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 Released!

dpblogs — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:53:00 GMT

Announcing the release of the ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3!

The ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 release enables users to visually design models and mappings using Visual Studio 2008 RTM and the .NET Framework 3.5 RTM. This release also incorporates fixes to bugs, performance improvements and includes many features requested by customers.

Elisa Flasko

Program Manager, Data Programmability

Deep EF

SamDruk — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:28:00 GMT

The gang at Channel 9 gave me a soapbox for talking about the Entity Data Model, the ADO.NET Entity Framework, SQL Server, a strong architectural factoring and a bunch of related rambling about how to build composite applications that handle massive quantities of data. Enjoy! (or not, sound off in the thread either way ;)

SamDruk

Connecting to Pre-Release Versions of SQL Server 2008

dpblogs — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:45:00 GMT

Testing has identified some issues connecting to versions of SQL Server 2008 from applications using the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 or developers using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008. These connectivity issues should be considered before upgrading any end-user systems to Vista SP1 Beta or Windows Server 2008 RC0, upgrading a backend database to SQL Server 2008, or upgrading developer systems to use Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 or RTM.

Design-Time Connectivity Between Visual Studio and SQL Server 2008

Developers using Visual Studio 2005 or any version of Visual Studio 2008 will be unable to connect to any instance of SQL Server 2008. This is most significant for Visual Basic and C# developers as it will effectively block the use of any RAD features to aid in the development of their project.

This connectivity issue is principally caused by an incompatibility between the SMO layer that ships in Visual Studio and the SMO support provided in SQL Server 2008. Future updates will replace the appropriate Visual Studio components and allow connectivity and RAD feature support to the SQL Server 2008 November CTP and later.

Runtime Connectivity to SQL Server 2008 Using System.Data.SqlClient

On systems that have installed the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1, applications that use System.Data.SqlClient to provide data access will be unable to connect to certain versions of SQL Server 2008 depending on the .NET Framework version installed on the client and the SQL Server 2008 version installed on the server. If either end of the connection is updated without consideration of the system as a whole, applications that were previously working would no longer be able to connect.

System.Data.dll, which contains the System.Data.SqlClient namespace, ships as part of the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1. This version of the .NET Framework ships with Visual Studio 2008, Vista SP1, and Windows Server 2008 and with each release of these products (beta, CTP, or release) there is a slightly different version of the .NET Framework. This is not unexpected with pre-release bits, as this is a normal part of the development cycle for each of these products. The released versions of these products will be interoperable and will allow for limited support of other pre-release components.

Below is a chart that identifies whether or not a connection can be established between managed data access applications using System.Data.SqlClient and particular versions of SQL Server 2008 (Katmai).

	SQL Server 2008
	June CTP	July CTP	Nov CTP
Any OS with .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 RTM redistributable¹ (System.Data.SqlClient, version 2.0. 50727.1433)	No	No	Yes
Any OS with .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 Beta2 redistributable² (System.Data.SqlClient, version 2.0. 50727.1378)	No	Yes	No
Vista SP1 Beta (System.Data.SqlClient, version 2.0.50727.1427)	No	No	Yes
Windows Server 2008 RC0 (System.Data.SqlClient, version 2.0.50727.1427)	No	No	Yes
Any OS with Visual Studio 2005 RTM Or .NET Framework v2.0 RTM³ (System.Data.SqlClient, version 2.0.50727.42)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Any OS with Visual Studio 2005 SP1³ (System.Data.SqlClient, version 2.0.50727.832)	Yes	Yes	Yes

¹ the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 RTM redistributable is installed as a pre-requisite for the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework v3.0 SP1, and .NET Framework v3.5
²the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 Beta 2 redistributable is installed as a pre-requisite for the Beta 2 versions of Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework v3.0 SP1, and .NET Framework v3.5
³ connection utilizes SQL Server 2005 data type compatibility

How Does this Impact Feature Availability

The chart below identifies the SQL Server 2008 features that are supported between different combinations of the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 releases and SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) releases.

SQL Server 2008

July CTP

Nov CTP

Future CTP/RTM

Any OS with

.NET Framework v2.0 SP1

RTM redistributable¹

(System.Data.dll,

version 2.0.50727.1433)

No connectivity

Table-Valued Parameters³

New date/time data types³

Large UDT³

Filestream³

Table-Valued Parameters

New date/time data types

Large UDT

Filestream

Any OS with

.NET Framework v2.0 SP1

Beta 2 redistributable²

(System.Data.dll,

version 2.0.50727.1378)

Table-Valued Parameters³

New date/time data types³

No connectivity

Vista SP1 Beta
(System.Data.dll,

version 2.0.50727.1427)

No connectivity

Table-Valued Parameters³

New date/time data types³

Large UDT³

Filestream³

Table-Valued Parameters

New date/time data types

Large UDT

Filestream

Windows Server 2008 RC0
(System.Data.dll,

version 2.0.50727.1427)

No connectivity

Table-Valued Parameters³

New date/time data types³

Large UDT³

Filestream³

Table-Valued Parameters

New date/time data types

Large UDT

Filestream

¹ the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 RTM redistributable is installed as a pre-requisite for the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework v3.0 SP1, and .NET Framework v3.5
²the .NET Framework v2.0 SP1 Beta 2 redistributable is installed as a pre-requisite for the Beta 2 versions of Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework v3.0 SP1, and .NET Framework v3.5
³this feature not available in managed stored procedures

Note that Vista RTM ships with the RTM version of .NET Framework v2.0 and, as such, does not contain support for any of the new SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) features that were introduced in .NET Framework v2.0 SP1.

Jason Smith
Development Lead, Data Programmability

Data Development Bonus Track - Devconnections Fall 2007

dpblogs — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 23:59:00 GMT

There's a new Bonus Track at at DevConnections this Fall!

Come and check out sessions in the new Data Access Bonus track to learn more about the many new, and not so new, Microsoft products providing developers with a more positive and efficient experience developing data-aware applications regardless of the technology that you choose as the basis for your app (Windows Forums, ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, etc.).

Learn about Sync Services for ADO.NET, the upcoming ADO.NET Entity Framework, how to take advantage of new features in SQL Server 2008, the new Project Astoria technology, and a brand new project that Microsoft is introducing in this space.

Data Technologies at Mix '07

dpblogs — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:39:00 GMT

There has been a lot of recent coverage on the participation of data technologies at Mix 07 and the announcements that we, the Data Programmability team at Microsoft, made regarding two new incubation projects that we are working on.

So, if you didn't get a chance to attend Mix, or just didn't get a chance to attend our sessions, here's a quick breakdown of Data at Mix 07.

The Data Programmability Team, including the ADO.NET and XML teams, presented 4 sessions and hosted 2 Sandbox sessions during the course of Mix 07.

· Pablo Castro presented 2 sessions (one repeat) on Accessing Data Services in the Cloud (Project Codename 'Astoria')

· Tim Scudder & Aaron Dunnington presented a Deep Dive session on Data Driven Experiences (LINQ to XML and Silverlight)

· Sam Druker & Shyam Pather presented a session Rapidly Building Data Driven Web Pages with Dynamic ADO.NET (Project Codename ‘Jasper’)

To learn more about these technologies, all sessions are available to view at the above links. You can also checkout more information on Project Astoria and Project Jasper on the MSDN Data and Storage Developers Center.

Elisa Johnson

Community Program Manager, Data Programmability

Microsoft’s Data Access Strategy

dpblogs — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 08:12:00 GMT

Over the last 12 months, Microsoft has been talking a lot about two major innovations related to representing and querying data. The first is the new Entity Data Model exposed as part of the ADO.NET Entity Framework, and the second is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework for integrating queries into the programming language known as LINQ. What are these technologies, how do they relate to one another, and what role do they play in Microsoft’s Data Access Strategy? Let’s start with Microsoft’s Data Access Strategy.

Does Microsoft have a Data Access Strategy?

Yes, it turns out we do. Microsoft envisions an Entity Data Platform that enables customers to define a common Entity Data Model across data services and applications. The Entity Data Platform is a multi-release vision, with future versions of reporting tools, replication, data definition, security, etc. all being built around a common Entity Data Model.

Within the .NET Framework, the ADO.NET Entity Framework is integral to this vision. The ADO.NET Entity Framework builds on our mutual investment in ADO.NET by enabling applications to write to a conceptual data model with strong notions of type, inheritance, and relationships. Through the use of “Client Views”, this conceptual model can be flexibly mapped to existing relational schemas, enabling the creation of new business structures when the underlying database schema cannot be changed and providing a level of indirection that helps isolate applications from naming as well as structural changes of the storage schema (for example, changes in the degree of storage schema normalization). The ability to work with a conceptual model greatly simplifies forms design and web service development where the underlying data store represents the model in a complex way.

Client Views are implemented within a new ADO.NET Data Provider called the Entity Client which supports an extended SQL grammar called Entity SQL (“ESQL”). ESQL provides a common query language across providers by extending the existing SQL language with constructs to work with strong notions of type, inheritance, and relationships from the Entity Data Model. By exposing the conceptual model through traditional ADO.NET Data Provider APIs (Connections, Commands, and Data Readers), existing ADO.NET programmers can immediately benefit from the conceptual model, common SQL language, and flexible mapping of the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

The ADO.NET Entity Framework also supports Object Services for building typed queries and returning, manipulating, and updating results as Business Objects. These Business Objects can be queried using ESQL, or through a new language innovation called LINQ.

What is LINQ?

Microsoft’s new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that provide common capabilities within the programming language for querying against in-memory data as well as external data sources. LINQ complements our vision for an Entity Data Platform by providing language extensions for querying data as objects within the programming language.

LINQ will ship as part of the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, codenamed Orcas. At the time that Orcas first ships, the .NET Framework will include support for LINQ over in-memory objects, LINQ over XML (XLINQ), LINQ over ADO.NET DataSets (LINQ to DataSet), and LINQ queries directly mapped to Microsoft SQL Server schemas (LINQ to SQL).

A few months after the shipment of Orcas, and within the first half of 2008, Microsoft will release the ADO.NET Entity Framework as an extension to the Orcas version of the .NET Framework. The ADO.NET Entity Framework will fully support LINQ through a feature known as “LINQ to Entities”. LINQ to Entities combines the developer experience of having query integrated into the programming language and the richness of being able to define an Entity Data Model with flexible mapping to relational stores.

What is the difference between LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities?

LINQ to SQL supports rapid development of applications that query Microsoft SQL Server databases using objects that map directly to SQL Server schemas. LINQ to Entities supports more flexible mapping of objects to Microsoft SQL Server and other relational databases through extended ADO.NET Data Providers.

If you are writing an application that requires any of the following features, you should use the ADO.NET Entity Framework:

· The ability to define more flexible mapping to existing relational schema, for example:

o Mapping a single class to multiple tables

o Mapping to different types of inheritance

o Directly Modeling Many to Many relationships

o Mapping to an arbitrary query against the store

· The ability to query relational stores other than the Microsoft SQL Server family of products.

· The ability to share a model across Replication, Reporting Services, BI, Integration Services, etc.

· A full textual query language

· The ability to query a conceptual model without materializing results as objects

If you do not require any of these features, LINQ to SQL may provide a simpler solution for rapid development. LINQ to SQL is targeted at rapid-development scenarios against Microsoft SQL Server and provides a simpler approach and richer design experience in the Orcas timeframe for applications with data classes that map directly to the schema of your Microsoft SQL Server database.

Microsoft is defining a migration plan for customers that start with LINQ to SQL and require additional functionality, such as richer mapping capabilities or access to other stores, to migrate to the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

Sounds great; how do I get started?

Both LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework, including LINQ to Entities, are available now as part of the Orcas Beta 1. LINQ over Objects, LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to DataSet will all ship as part of the Orcas release of the .NET Framework. We will continue to ship CTPs and Betas of the ADO.NET Entity Framework that align with Orcas throughout the remainder of this year.

Mike Pizzo,
Architect, Data Programmability

VSLive Keynote - San Francisco

dpblogs — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 06:29:00 GMT

Britt Johnston, Director, Data Programmability at Microsoft gave a Keynote speech this morning at VSLive in San Francisco. In his presentation, Britt spoke largely about the idea of Conceptual Data Programming and Microsoft's vision for Data Access, raising the level of abstraction around data access to allow developers to be more productive and allow us to write less code.

Britt began by talking about the idea of programming against a Conceptual data model rather than the Logical data model that we currently program to, and ended by delving into the key technoglogies that Microsoft plans to focus on for future innovation including continuing investment in the Entity Framework, an Entity-level services ecosystem (Reporting, Synchronization, etc.), and the Enabling of Dynamic Applications (Conceptual Programming, Integrated Development Experience, Device to Cloud Support, etc.).

Throughout his presentation, Britt went on to showcase 5 short videos or screencasts that demonstrated some of the work, specifically around Tools, that the Data Programmability team has been doing. These videos provide some great information and a preview of the new XML Editor, XSLT Debugger, and EDM Wizard coming in Orcas, as well as a sneak preview of a new XSD Designer and EDM Designer that we can expect to see released after the upcoming Orcas release.

Updated 101 LINQ Samples for Orcas March CTP

dpblogs — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:54:00 GMT

We've updated the 101 LINQ Samples code to include the 101 LINQ to Entities Samples! Check out the updated samples here.