Investments for data-centric applications and services

Steven Guggenheimer — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:05:00 GMT

I’m really excited about a couple of great new products to help developers be more productive in their day-to-day lives: the Entity Framework Beta 3 and the ASP.NET Extensions Preview.

With today’s Beta 3 release of the ADO.NET Entity Framework, we are providing a platform for developers to use LINQ against any back end database. Multiple database providers, including IBM, MySQL AB and Sybase, have already pledged support and are developing Entity Framework-enabled offerings. The commitment from these other vendors shows that we are doing something that they think has merit. The Entity Framework really is a cool technology. Instead of worrying about programming in T-SQL developers can now define things as entities (like a customer, or a location). It saves developers a lot of time and hassle and helps keep data consistent.

The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview, available in the coming days, is a preview of some of the new features that will be available in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, which allows developers to build rich, interactive data-centric applications and services for the web. The Entity Framework is included here as well, along with ASP.NET MVC, ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Increased ASP.NET AJAX functionality.

A View from the Application Platform Team : Entity Framework

Investments for data-centric applications and services