system.data.objects dev guy

I'll be happy to see if we can see effects of advices of this excellent gang - like many others i am worried about especially PI matters around EF.

This is really good news Danny :) I'm very happy that the DP team looks outside their office to get influences and the line-up is really the all-star team. Good job!

Danny Simmons announced the creation of the DP Advisory council to help with making the next version

Wow, be very interesting to hear how it goes because I think most of us are heavily influenced by the work of Evans/Fowler and so on.

Great stuff.

Over the past year or two, I've been a casual observer into the Entity Framework coming out of Microsoft

Ado.Net Entity Framework - Vote of no confidence - NO !

Just a quick note to make sure people are aware of a couple interesting events from the last day or two.

I hope Eric Evans, Martin Fowler, Jimmy Nilsson and the other ones in this Advisory Council will get Microsoft on the right track so that Microsoft  soon can start to deliver tools that are useful for DDD.  (My frustration about the lack of support in VisualStudio for "domain model driven development/design" began back in year 2000 when I had to give up working with domain objects  and instead had to work with typed datasets and apply OO only to the infrastructure and not to any domain objects . The frustration increased when ObjectSpaces was canceled. Then it decreased a lot when I first heard of LINQ, just to increase again when I started to look what is actually in LINQ to SQL and The entity Framework.)  

This is absolutely not an easy task for this council. It seems to be so many problems not only with the frameworks, but also the debate about them: Some more data centric people doeasn’t see the problems at all. Microsoft does not understand that we need a domain object model first, not code first instead of database schema first. Some  peoply are just negative to EF because it is a Microsoft product. (It seems så sad.)

I’ve been doing my best to do other things lately and completely missed this terrific news. Opening up

For reasons which are hard for outsiders to see, persistence has clearly been a ten-year exercise in cat-herding for Microsoft. At this point the hour is quite late - Microsoft needs to pick a clear direction, commit, and get on with it in what remains of 2008.

To be blunt, going out to 2010 with more equivocating and mixed messages isn't going to be in anyone's best interest, especially Microsoft's.

Over a ten year span or just the past year?

Sorry to be flippant. Developers and architects I know have wanted persistence off the radar for years. At a time when folks are trying to grapple with the architecture futures for moving forward with SOA, SaaS, WS-*, cloud services, etc. we find we are still mired in the inanity of the guts of persistence (not that it, in of itself, isn't interesting). If MS and developers can't collectively move this off our plates fairly quickly than I have some serious concerns about our ability to confront some of the more daunting challenges ahead that are being confronted with WxF, Oslo, S+S, and cloud-based services.

Most of us 'common folk' don't want to have to follow Jenning's and others' blogs in order to keep up with the debate, dueling APIs, and various technical excursions in persistance - we just want it summarily dealt with once and for all in some fashion or another whether it is an actual MS solution or an open set of interfaces anyone can plug into.

I know this is a difficult affair or this advisory council wouldn't exist. But, it has been a difficult affair for way too long. Projects have been and are cranking up every day of this years-long debate and the people on those projects simply want clear guidance and direction on persistence - something which is still not on the immediate horizon and needs to be as soon as humanly possible so we can move on to other priorities.

Microsoft Does Domain Driven Design

Microsoft Data Programmability Konseyi

Unless you don't read blogs on a regular basis you have probably already seen the No Confidence debate about the Entity Framework that shipped with Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Just in case you missed it here are some links about the topic: OakLeaf Systems