The ADONET Team today announced that the June CTP of Entity Framework is available. It is currently only available packaged with the June CTP of Visual Web Developer Express. Being a CTP release, they have just done enough to get something in our hands so we can see what they are working on.

A lot of what is in here is what I saw Brian Dawson using at DevConnections in March.

The ADONET team blog post lists the changes to look for and makes some important notes about the installation.

I’m off to download!

While at TechEd, David Sceppa wrote about the status of various database vendors as they create proviers for LINQ and Entity Framework. read more

[A new DevLife post]

The ADO.NET team is conducting a focus group about Linq to Entities during TEchEd. Unfortunately, they posted this today and the deadline to sign up is today.

Here’s the info to sign up.

I won’t be at TEchEd this year and neither will Roger Jennings, but Roger has already created a great list of points he would bring up if he was there. I basically second all of his suggestions. Many of them point to clarity on Microsoft’s messaging around Entity Framework (though I personally feel comfortable with this at this point) and then technical details such as being able to deal with perfectly normal relationships between data…you can read what I mean by this if you check out this forum thread.

I guess we can’t call it ADO.NET Orcas any more…. I guess the right name will just be ADO.NET 3.5.

In my short span betwee MIX and DevTeach (leaving tonight), I’ve been heads down playing with Silverlight’s Inking capabilities and preparing for my DevTeach sessions and avoiding dealing with the delay of EF.

In the meantime, Roger Jennings continues to organize all of the info about ADO.NET Entity Framework into comprehensive posts such as this one.

Mike Taulty’s library of LINQ to SQL videos has grown by orders of magnitude. Now he’s posting LINQ to XML. When I see how many 15-20 minute videos it is taking Mike to demo and explain LINQ to SQL in a way that is satisfactory, it keeps making me laugh at the absurdity of covering whatever I can manage to squeeze into conference sessions that range from 60 – 90 minutes. Mike definitely has the right way to acheive this!!

These two incubator projects build on top of the Entity Framework. It’s a very early look at what the data access team is working on. READ MORE HERE

[A New DevLife post]

In Pablo Castro’s session today, I noticed a link on the resource page to his own blog. I have never known that Pablo (tech lead on the ADO.NET team) had a blog and couldn’t believe that I could have missed such a thing. Luckily there is wireless available at the conference so I immediately browsed to the blog and lo and behold, he had made his first post just today! It is on the Astoria Web Data Services.

http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/

I was wondering what “data services in the cloud” … Pablo Castro’s Mix Session, was going to be about.

Project Astoria exposes data that is exposed through the Entity Framework. So you build your EDM and then the service sits on top of htat.

It is two way… you can use HTTP PUT, POST and DELETE.

Here is a post on the ADO.NET team blog about the project Astoria, that is the web data services.

I’m in Pablo’s talk right now, but you can check out the project here  and the blog post here.

The second one is called Jasper which is for purely data driven apps. I’m looking forward to Sam Druker’s talk on this on Wednesday. Read the blog post here.

Mike Pizzo writes a post about Microsoft’s data access strategy that covers a few important things:

1) Announces that EF will not make it into the Orcas release but will ship “A few months after the shipment of Orcas, and within the first half of 2008”. This plan will allow them to give us more than what they would be able to give us in the initial Orcas release.
2) Addresses the LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework question, which has been asked quite a lot.

READ MORE HERE

[A New DevLife post]
 

Mike Taulty has been doing short screen casts about LINQ to SQL. I love his approach as I know from experience how difficult it is to try to give a decent presentation of LINQ to SQL in a single 90 minute session when you have to start from scratch.

There are 9 so far and more coming. Here is a link to the latest (that includes links to the first 8 as well). Stay tuned for more.