Data : XML

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

XML Technology and Tools Survey

dpblogs — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:37:00 GMT

The Data Programmability XML Tools team is conducting a survey focused on XML technology and tools usage over the coming weeks. The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete and we’d appreciate it if you would take the time to respond to it. We plan to use the survey results to help drive prioritization of features over the coming releases of Visual Studio and SQL Server.

The survey can be found here: https://mscuillume.smdisp.net/Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=XMLTools

Thanks,
Tim Laverty
PM, XML Tools

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

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.

MSXML4 is going to be kill bit-ed

dpblogs — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:39:00 GMT

Our XML team announced this morning that, as a part of our MSXML4 End of Life plan, we will kill bit MSXML4 in the October – December timeframe of 2007. The kill Bit applies to Internet Explorer only, after which, applications will not be able to create MSXML4 objects in the browser.

We are announcing this in advance so our customers have sufficient time to test applications with MSXML6 and provide us with feedback. Please email msxml4@microsoft.com with feedback, questions or concerns.

For more information, you can check out the post here.

Data Access Virtual Labs

alexbarn — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 04:59:00 GMT

MSDN Virtual Labs allows customers to quickly evaluate or learn how to build applications through a series of guided, hands-on labs which can be completed in 90 minutes or less.

The best part is, the MSDN Virtual Labs do not require any installation and are available to customers immediately for free.

The MSDN Data Access Virtual Labs offers the following labs to try out right now:

XML Tools in Visual Studio 2005 New!

After completing this lab, you will be better able to:

Work with XML Editor
Work with XML Schemas
Work with XSLT Debugger

ADO.NET vNext August CTP New!

Use the bits released in the ADO.NET vNext August CTP without installing bits on your machine :-)

SQL Server 2005 SQL Server and ADO.NET (Lab A)