Problem statement Today in Astoria if you have two entity types that are functionally in a containment relationship, you still see a top-level entity set for the instances of the contained type, and further the URLs for instances of the contained types that go through the parent type contain redundant information. For example, assuming a schema w...
While we worked hard to make it such that any HTTP client can easily consume an ADO.NET Data Service, we are also working on client libraries for the .NET Framework, Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX to up the level of abstraction clients written on those platforms. The .NET Framework an ASP.NET AJAX libraries shipped with the Dec 2007 CTP of ADO....
Note: This post refers to the CTP available here. When building frameworks to expose and consume data on the web, access policy and data validation are always one of the first topics discussed during the design process, at conferences, etc. Given this, we thought the topic would be a good one to kick off a series of blog posts about the fea...
The default serialization format for ADO.NET Data Services is now Atom instead of alternative XML-based formats we experimented with in previous releases. In short, we chose this format because when combined with the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) specification, this industry standard format can be used for general purpose data exchange. ...
The first CTP of the production version of ADO.NET Data Services is now available for download here as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview release. We are referring to this as the "first CTP" because the releases of Astoria prior to this were based on a prototype code base which we used to iterate quickly and explore the requirements of data...
A new name, but goals stay the same As per our last blog post, we just finished a round of presentations on Astoria at Tech Ed EMEA, Tech Ed Africa, Dev Connections and finally Dev Teach. Thanks to everyone that attended our sessions and who stopped by our product booths for a chat. We much appreciate your feedback and learning how you see the tec...
A few members of the Astoria team will be presenting on the technology in the coming month. We look forward to meeting those attending the conferences and discussing the project with you. Presentations include: Pablo Castro @ Tech Ed: http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/07/developers/content/Pages/Default.aspx Mike Fl...
The question is: what data sources should Astoria support as inputs? Should we allow ADO.NET Entity Framework only or open up more? If we open up more, how does the system need to be layered to enable the use of those alternate data sources? Let me step back for a second first and establish why certain data sources are interesting. Why does Astor...
Deciding on something that becomes a public interface of a developer-oriented technology is a tricky task. Not only does the resulting design need to be correct and complete, but also there are various aspects that are more around aesthetics and personal preference. The URI format used by Astoria will need to survive both sets of challenges… ...
Some time ago we shipped Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and a couple of weeks later we added the ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 2 release as well as the first CTP of the tools for it. Once all of the frameworks/tools were in Beta 2 we got a bunch of email “encouraging” us to release a Beta 2-compatible version of the Astoria CTP :-) The Astoria Se...
