Pablo Castro's blog : MIX08

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

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