Pablo Castro's blog : Conferences

Every SharePoint 2010 server is a Data Services server

pabloc — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:26:00 GMT

I haven't been writing much here, mostly because I've been way too busy but also because I couldn't discuss publicly many of the things I'm doing. Now that SharePoint 2010 has been announced and its feature set published everywhere, I can finally discuss one of the coolest things we've been up to lately.

SharePoint is a repository of resources (list items and documents in document libraries) that are collected and manipulated collaboratively. Resources have a bunch of security and business logic attached to them, such as who can see each item, who gets to change it, or whether a particular column in a list needs to conform to a particular validation formula.

When SharePoint folks said they wanted a RESTful interface this was great news...the system is just a perfect fit. Not only it's a perfect fit for RESTful services in general, but also for Astoria in particular. In the end SharePoint is very data-centric in nature, it already supports queries and business logic as part of the uniform interface.

So we're really excited to announce that as of SharePoint 2010, every SharePoint server is an Astoria server out of the box. No configuration required or anything, just make sure the proper version of ADO.NET Data Services is in the box. For SharePoint 2010 beta, the "right" version is ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP2. We'll put details out there for future iterations as they come.

Official write up in the Astoria team blog.

The SharePoint Data Service head is not just a side integration deal, it's a full-on REST-over-HTTP head for SharePoint. It supports browsing as well as modifying data using regular HTTP verbs (GET, PUT, DELETE, etc.), it does ETags for concurrency control, enforces business logic as part of side-effecting methods, and it handles the full range of Data Services conventions for URLs, Atom and JSON payload formats, etc. It also exposes full metadata like any other Astoria service, allowing Visual Studio and any other metadata-driven client to give you a great experience on the client side. Now if you need to get or manipulate data in SharePoint from any platform in any language, all you need is an HTTP stack.

The other cool aspect is that the SharePoint folks where able to build this entirely on top of public bits, using our new fancy provider model for advanced data sources I discussed here some time ago.

SharePoint joins a growing family of Microsoft products that enable users to share data through the use of a simple RESTful interface that follows the Astoria conventions when needed (e.g. URLs, structured data in Atom). Another example on the server side include SQL Server Reporting Services, which in SQL Server 2008 R2 can now render any report as Atom feed that follows the Astoria conventions (examples here). On the client, in addition to developer-oriented options such as .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, PHP, Java and more, we now also have PowerPivot (f.k.a. Gemini) which can pull data from any data service and do fancy analysis and publishing over it, making it trivial to bring data from Data Services into Microsoft Excel 2010 among other things.

I find this to be extremely important. A simple, uniform way of sharing data at the protocol level, and in a way that truly enables the lowest possible bar of entry, is key to enable broad integration across products and break data silos that form around applications.

I'll be talking about this at the SharePoint conference 2009 in Las Vegas this week, and at the Professional Developer Conference (PDC 2009) in late November. If you're attending any of these and this sounds interesting, these sessions will drill into plenty of details.

-pablo

Mix 2009 next week in Las Vegas

pabloc — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 01:16:32 GMT

Given how much of what we do in my team is related to the web (ADO.NET Data Services, System.Xml, etc.), Mix is one of the events I look forward every year, both to share some of the stuff we're working on and to hear from attendees who are building real-world applications.

If you are around, feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat. I'll be there through the whole event, and will be doing two talks on Friday, one on the Entity Framework and how some of its new features can make life easier when writing web applications, and another one on ADO.NET Data Services where I’ll discuss how to build RESTful data-centric interfaces and what’s coming in the future of Data Services.

“Modeling RESTful Data Services: Present and Future”: here I’ll discuss how to build RESTful data-centric services using today’s version of the Data Services framework as well as what’s coming in the future for Data Services.
“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework”: in this one I’ll talk about the Entity Framework and how some of its new features can make life easier when writing web applications. (no, I did not choose the title for this one)

-pablo

Now you know...it's Windows Azure

pabloc — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:02:29 GMT

Since we shipped ADO.NET Data Services v1 in .NET 3.5 SP1 (and actually before that as well) I've been working on a few things that I could share (such as offline/sync support for data services) and some that I couldn't discuss publicly until all the big plans where announced.

This week at PDC Microsoft announced Windows Azure. A lot has been written about it, so I won't go into the details.

On our side, in the data services team, we made our small contribution to the big picture.

The Windows Azure table service is a structured storage facility that's part of the core part of Azure. Access to the table service is done through a data-services compatible RESTful interface that uses the Astoria conventions over an HTTP binding. That means that you use either any client with an HTTP stack to talk to it, or you can use the ADO.NET Data Services client, which does a nice job exposing data as .NET objects, letting you write simple queries using LINQ instead of URLs, etc.

Another cool thing about the table service (and the blobs and queuing service for that matter) is that they are accessible both from the virtual compute environment and from anywhere in the Internet. In both cases, if you're using .NET, you can use the data services client to interact with it. In the case of code running in the Windows Azure hosting environment, the client is already present (the environment includes .NET 3.5 SP1) so you can use it without worrying about taking new dependencies.

You find out more about the table service you can watch Brad's PDC session for a discussion of the service itself, and this other session than Niranjan and I did together (or "will do" if you're reading this before Wed in the PDC week) for a drill down on how to program the Windows Azure table service. If you're not at PDC no worries, these talks are accessible to online.

On the next layer up from the core, the Windows Azure service layer, SQL Data Services also is making big announcements in this PDC. We're introducing more relational capabilities into the system, and also experimenting with a data services-compatible interface. This PDC talk from Patrick will discuss and demo the new interface, and you can follow how this effort goes here.

-pablo

Unifying service interfaces

pabloc — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:37:00 GMT

As David Treadwell announced yesterday, we are starting to align the Windows Live services interfaces to use the AtomPub protocol, and to have a uniform set of conventions that are shared across internet services and the Project Astoria bits.

What does that mean? It means that starting now (and more in the future) you can interact with many consumer and infrastructure services in the same way. It also means that those Microsoft services out there and your own services -online or on-premises- created with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework look and behave in highly compatible ways.

You won't need to learn yet another API every time a new service comes out. Furthermore, we (or you, or services providers out there) won't need to create new APIs for every service. Highly uniform interfaces bring the opportunity for extensive client library and tools re-use across services of broad nature.

We've been talking about this for a while...and it's exiting to see the first pieces start to come in place.

If you want to know more, see live demos of services and tools working together, and chat about the details, we'll be going through all of this at Mix 2008. There is a talk specifically about this called "Accessing Windows Live Services using AtomPub" where I'll be telling the whole story and showing the thing working live.

More details about our Mix sessions here.

-pablo

Going to Mix 2008? See you in Las Vegas!

pabloc — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:00:00 GMT

Mix is one of my favorite events. It's a different kind of conference, many perspectives all in one place. Since it's all about the web, the Astoria team couldn't miss Mix 2008.

Mike, Andy and myself will be there giving talks, making announcements and hanging out in the open space area. So if you want to chat about the ADO.NET Data Services Framework or about data and services on the web in general come find us there!

Check out session times, titles and abstracts in the Mix 2008 session list.

-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