The release of Visual Studio Service Pack 1 today (currently available for MSDN Subscribers to download), marks the RTM of Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services. It's been a long haul for EF, initially shown off in early 2006. ADO.NET Data Services, or ANDS as I've seen Shawn Wildermuth call it (though I still call it Astoria) is a bit younger, making its first public appearance in March 2007 at MIX.
So they are finally here. There were a lot of doubting Thomas' in the first year or so of EF, thinking it would go the way of some other projects that never saw the light of day.
Congratulations to everyone in the Data Programmability team for taking this vision and making it real. And this is just the start. The vision for Entity Data Model is very big and there is much more to come for clients of Entity Data Models. And this first release of Entity Framework for .NET developers to use an EDM is just the beginning as well, with V2 is already in the works.
I also think that today is a good day to give a nod to a man who helped EF get on it's first legs, and you'll find his name as an author of this early whitepaper about EF, Next-Generation Data Access: Making the Conceptual Level Real - Jim Gray.
