Elisa Flasko's Blog

Ok so i need to run a test here... i'm trying to figure out how to make a long post only show up on my main page as the first 200-300 words with a link to the rest of the post... You'd think there'd be documentation on this right... I can't find it... so let's see...

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Nam porttitor elit ac nibh porttitor pellentesque. Praesent porta nulla et sapien malesuada vitae consequat ligula accumsan. Vestibulum in neque velit, non elementum massa. Proin faucibus nisi aliquet augue laoreet convallis. Duis ut pretium tellus. Donec eget risus leo. Etiam erat risus, scelerisque vitae commodo vitae, scelerisque ac massa. Nam est lectus, mollis ac imperdiet in, vestibulum at magna. Vestibulum nibh tellus, condimentum elementum vestibulum a, feugiat sit amet turpis. Ut suscipit libero ut dolor convallis adipiscing. Morbi sagittis, diam a commodo pellentesque, mauris risus tincidunt turpis, quis iaculis augue enim quis nibh. Duis non enim ac eros sodales suscipit nec eu est. Proin tortor elit, feugiat nec commodo dictum, auctor et velit. Nulla varius, ante vel porta ultricies, diam eros sodales nunc, non malesuada quam mauris non augue. Mauris a turpis tellus. Proin cursus consequat leo, at sodales erat molestie ac. Nunc ut ipsum id justo sodales bibendum. Fusce nibh orci, aliquam vel mattis eu, lacinia eget diam.

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Ok, so I'm sitting in a session at DevTeach in Montreal right now... and someone mentioned to me that they didn't know of any Entity Framework Providers (outside of SQL) that had actually released yet... and I realized that I never got around to posting the links on my blog!

The first Entity Framework providers were released at the beginning of September, by Devart (ADO.NET Blog post) to support Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

More recently we've also seen releases of providers by Npgsql for PostgreSQL in October, and by Sybase IAnywhere with the release of SQL Anywhere 11.

Check them out!

DevTeach aims offers TechEd like content and high calibre, TechEd speakers to Canadians, without traveling all the way to the US! Check out sessions across 8 different tracks (including a couple of really great sessions by myself and Carl Perry on the Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services).

This year the conference will take place in Montreal from Dec 2-4th. All TechDays attendees can receive $350 off the conference price and all Canadian user group attendees will receive $100 off the conference price too.

What can you expect this year? All attendees will receive $1000 in software (Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Expression Web 2 and the Tech-Ed Conference DVD Set).

See you there!!

- Elisa

We've waited a good long while, but RTM is finally here for both the ADO.NET Entity Framework as well as ADO.NET Data Services! Both are now available as part of the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (tools and runtime) and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (for just the runtime without tools) releases that were announced this morning.

You can check out more information as well as the downloads at http://msdn.microsoft.com/data (keep checking back as I will continue updating content all week to reflect the releases) and check out my most recent MSDN articles on Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services for a bit more info.

There has recently been an interesting thread in the community going on about a "vote of no confidence" for the first version of the Entity Framework, and Tim Mallalieu has posted a complete response, detailing how our team is working to address many of the concerns that have been raised in V2 of the Entity Framework.

To summarize here, the scenarios raised are scenarios that we truly to care deeply about, but do not fully support in V1, as we unfortunately had to make the choice between adding more features (these features more specifically, as they were all considered heavily as we received and heard feedback from this subset of the community) vs. working towards the initial goal set out for V1, which was to lay the groundwork for a multi-release strategy around the Entity Framework and the Microsoft Data Platform.

Anyways, I'm not going to restate all of what's in Tim's post... but you can check it out here.

Taking a page from the Astoria team... We're opening up the EF :)

Today really marked the beginning of our work on Entity Framework V2 and as part of that, we were able to extend the very successful transparent design process that we have been using for ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) to the Entity Framework team.

You can check out details of the process and learn more about how you can get involved and provide feedback in Tim Mallalieu's initial post, and of course you can check out all the upcoming design details at the New Entity Framework Design Blog .

Let us know what you think!

This morning at TechEd, Microsoft announced Project "Velocity" an explicit, distributed, in-memory application cache platform. Project “Velocity” increases performance of applications, by moving the data out of the data store, and closer to the application in the middle tier, significantly reducing the number or trips made to and from the data store to retrieve data. Project “Velocity” allows you to efficiently combine memory on existing machines in the middle tier, allow them to act as a single unified cache, avoiding the need for larger more expensive machines. “Velocity” also helps to increase the availability of data through an easily configurable fail-over caching system.

For more information and to download CTP1, check out the Data Developer Center on MSDN

The most recent versions of the ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta and ADO.NET Data Services Beta are now available!

Both the Entity Framework and Data Services have now officially become part of the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 releases beginning with the Beta released this morning. These will also be the final Beta prior to the RTM of these two projects.

For more information on these releases and on changes that have been since the last public releases, check out the ADO.NET Team and Astoria Team blogs.

We all develop applications that in some way retrieve or manipulate data... and now there are so many different technologies to choose from!

Looking for a good place to find information on Data Development? I've been working with this great to new site to help them get content... The site is just getting started... but I have to say they've made a pretty good first go. In talking with the site managers, they've started with just two basic topics, ADO.NET and XML, but plan to continue to add more topics and new content as it becomes available. There are some great articles, links to articles, and tutorials to get you started.

Check it out and let them know what you think!

http://datadeveloper.net

PS. If you're interested... being a new community site, they are also looking for people interested in writing and helping to generate content...

What do these all have in common?

On Wednesday, David Treadwell posted to the Windows Live blog, giving a sneak peek into what you can expect to hear more about next week Mix08.

"At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.

In addition, these same protocols and the same services are now ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as “ Project Astoria”) compatible. This means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints, leveraging a large amount of existing knowledge and tooling shared with on-premise SQL deployments...."

For more on this and other ADO.NET Data Services news at Mix check out our three focused sessions:

Wed, March 5th - RESTful Data Services with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework by Pablo Castro

Fri, March 7th - Accessing Windows Live Services via AtomPub by Pablo Castro

Fri, March 7th - Building RESTful Real World Applications with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework by Mike Flasko

How great was the LA Launch kickoff event on Wednesday? It seemed to be a good time for those that got in. The sold out event began with Steve Ballmer's keynote at the Nokia Theater and continued through the day at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Most exciting for myself and the ADO.NET team, my Getting Started with the Entity Framework chalk talk saw more than a full room as people crowded the entrance to listen in.

For more information on the launch or a chance to check out the Virtual Launch, check out http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/default.mspx

Wondering when you'll get to use the new SQL 2008 Data Types with LINQ to SQL? Check out a new post by the ADO.NET Team that talks about the work they are currently doing. http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/02/21/coming-soon-to-linq-to-sql.aspx

This morning Microsoft made a pretty big announcement. We announced that we would implement 4 new interoperability principles across many of our products including Vista and the .NET Framework, that will impact product development, documentation , and community outreach.

1. Ensuring open connections

2. Promoting data portability

3. Enhancing support for industry standards

4. Fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities

The last three, I believe will be of most interest to my team and the technologies we work on. As mentioned in the Microsoft press release, this announcement highlights the "significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing", and as the Data team, this is a big part of what we are working to enable.

Also in the press release, a number of specifics were highlighted to give example of how these principles would be implemented, including:

• Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. To promote and enable more interoperability between commercial and community-based open source technologies and Microsoft products, this initiative will provide resources, facilities and events, including labs, plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development.
• Expanding industry outreach and dialogue. An ongoing dialogue with customers, developers and open source communities will be created through an online Interoperability Forum. In addition, a Document Interoperability Initiative will be launched to address data exchange between widely deployed formats.

With the recently announced AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft, an open-sources dev tool, developers building World of Warcraft add-ons can get the Visual Studio experience without requiring any version of Visual Studio to be installed or licensed.  The developer environment makes use of the new free Visual Studio 2008 shell.

Included in the VS2008 Shell, is the XML Editor and XSLT Debugger which earn high praises from WoW developers on http://www.wowwiki.com/HOWTO:_Set_up_Visual_Studio_for_WoW_XML

Well I'm posting this a bit late, as it's been a crazy week, but on Sunday evening we released the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview including ADO.NET Data Services (also known as Project "Astoria"). Get the download here. More information here and here.

Jonathan Carter has recently begun a great 8-part article on ADO.NET Data Services as well.