Pablo Castro's blog : ADO.NET

Coming from under the rocks just to celebrate for a bit

pabloc — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:46:00 GMT

I've been sort of under a rock for a while, but I thought I'd come out for a minute to celebrate. Today we made available .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1. There are two components in the release I spent a bunch of time on, which interestingly enough have very different origins and get to RTM through very different processes. One is the ADO.NET Entity Framework, which has been cooking for several years and survived controversies, comparisons with non-shipped previous attempts and other natural disasters; the other one is the ADO.NET Data Services Framework or Project Astoria, which was built, well...fast.

I won't go into details of the release, folks have discussed the Astoria, Entity Framework and general data-related features in the release already.

Why have I been under a rock? In the last few months I've been spending time working on various things related to Astoria, online services and data interfaces. Some I can discuss, some will need to wait a bit until the stakeholders are comfortable to talk about it publicly.

Moving Astoria as a framework forward: we were ready (modulo bug fixing and last minute tweaks) some time ago, and we've been thinking about the next steps for the Astoria framework. In Mix 08 we mentioned that we were working on "Astoria Offline" and showed a prototype. We've been working hard in that topic. There is also a bunch of features we want to take on for the next release. I'm sure we'll post something in the Astoria blog at some point about our thinking and give a change for folks to give feedback.

Online services: as you can imagine there is a number of things going on around online services these days, and a number of them involve Astoria one way or the other. I've been working with several of them, varying from providing guidance all the way to writing custom "v.next" versions of Astoria to experiment with their needs. An example of these efforts is the work we're doing to align SQL Server Data Services and the ADO.NET Data Services framework. We would like to see them as the "service" and the "framework" pieces, both using the same HTTP interface, same client interfaces, etc., so we've been spending a bunch of time exploring how to bring them together.

Anyway, there, a bit of a celebration.

-pablo

Data Services and Entity Framework beta bits available

pabloc — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:48:00 GMT

The news are out. The ADO.NET Data Services Framework (Astoria) and the ADO.NET Entity Framework will be shipping as part of .NET 3.5 SP1, and the Beta 1 release is now available. All the official blogs discussed the details already, including the Astoria team blog, ADO.NET team blog, Scott's, and many others out there.

Folks out there trying Astoria and the EFx have been working on bits from last December for a while. Finally we have a newer release for everyone to take a look, try stuff and send feedback.

In addition to the release of the framework and VS, we also put out the Data Services AJAX library in codeplex.

This is the last beta before we're done, so give this release a shot and let us know what you find!

-pablo

Provider availability enables Entity Framework and Data Services over many database vendors

pabloc — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:14:00 GMT

There are fresh news about ADO.NET provider support here, and there is an official looking statement from last December with more details here.

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is designed so that the upper layers of the system are database-independent. There has been many attempts at this in the past, with varying degrees of success.

I really like the Entity Framework approach because it goes all the way. It's not just a bunch of interfaces to make the API itself generic, but it's also machinery to make things that need to be provider independent so. For example, the Entity SQL compiler and the LINQ to Entities translator sit high in the stack and provides the *same code* for query translation across all databases. That means guaranteed consistency in syntax, something that was somewhere between hard and impossible before.

Of course, at some point we hand out the query expression to the provider for database-specific handling, and behavioral differences may arise there, but they are much more contained.

Coming back to the topic at hand, I've been looking at all the buzz about adoption of the ADO.NET Entity Framework provider model and how it enables access to many databases. This is a big deal...we kind of slowed down on database independence with previous versions of ADO.NET. This new round restores the database independent capabilities.

This is great news both for the Entity Framework and for Data Services (Astoria). It means that developers writing middle-tier code against databases and those creating Data Services get immediate support for using many databases in addition to SQL Server.

In the case of Data Services, the system itself is designed for data source independent beyond databases. If you have an IQueryable implementation, you're ready to go for read-only services (and you can add IUpdatable for update support). For custom data sources this flexibility is great. However, when you're targeting relational databases there is no need to go through the process of writing your own IQueryable (which is far from an easy task); we included rich database support out of the box through integration with the Entity Framework.

-pablo

Project Astoria December CTP is out!

pabloc — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:56:00 GMT

We just released the December 2007 CTP of Project Astoria, or I guess I should say the ADO.NET Data Services framework as Mike pointed out.

This is an important milestone for Astoria, as this is the first release that is based on the real, production code base and not on the initial prototype that we built to explore the space. Formats, APIs, URLs and other interface elements have been extensively revisited so I would recommend that you switch to the new CTP for any future work.

This CTP is compatible with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008, so you can finally move off intermediate builds of it when working with Astoria.

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this new CTP!

-pablo

TechEd Europe next week

pabloc — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:35:00 GMT

I'll be attending TechEd Developers EMEA in Barcelona, Span next week. I'll be giving talks on Astoria, the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ. If you'll be around and want to chat I'll be around the conference most of the time that I'm not speaking. See you there!

-pablo

Astoria CTP for Visual Studio 2008 is here

pabloc — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:47:00 GMT

We got many emails lately asking whether we were going to ship a version of the Astoria CTP that would work with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and the ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 2.

Well, it’s out now. You can read about it in the Astoria Team blog and download it from there.

Note that what we did was, for the most part, just port it to Beta 2. We didn’t include any of the production code work that we’ve been doing all this time. Once we’re ready we’ll drop the prototype code-base that we’ve been using for the CTPs and start shipping the real bits.

Give it a try and send any feedback you may have this way!

-pablo

Channel 9 episode: the Entity Framework one year later

pabloc — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 04:52:00 GMT

Almost exactly a year ago Mike, Britt and I did a Channel 9 episode where we talked about the Entity Framework and we said that we were going to have a runtime that would expose an EDM view of the database, and we also said that we were going to have great tools to design the schemas and mappings and that we would services on top of the EDM.

Now, a year later, a lot of these things have become true. The Entity Framework is solid and just shipped beta 2, we put out the first CTP of our tools story, and we're building services on top such as Project Astoria.

Interesting to get some perspective a year later. In this new Channel 9 episode the same folks (Mike, Britt, myself) chat with Charles about the same stuff, but now with something concrete at hand :)

-pablo

ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 2 is out, with tools :)

pabloc — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:33:00 GMT

Visual Studio Orcas Beta 2 shipped a few weeks ago and folks have been asking how to work with the Entity Framework using the new Beta. Well, a couple of days ago we shipped the Beta 2 of the Entity Framework, which will integrate nicely with Visual Studio Beta 2.

This beta includes a bunch of work that we've been doing in the last few months. Probably the single most exciting thing in it is the fact that we finally included our visual design tools for EDM schema modeling and mapping. This should significantly reduce (and sometimes eliminate) the amount of time you spend dealing with the Entity Framework XML files.

A description of the release, the new features, and pointers to the download pages are available in the ADO.NET team blog.

As always, feedback is very welcome.

-pablo