Category Archives: Data Access

ADO.NET at MIX07: REST? Dynamic? Hmmmm

Data Access

I found some interesting ADO.NET labs and sessions on the MIX site today!

SESSIONS

Accessing Data Services in the Cloud
Speaker(s): Pablo Castro – Microsoft
Audience(s): Designer, Developer
Come learn about new Microsoft technologies that enable you to make your data available over the Web through a simple REST interface and using open formats such as plan XML, JSON or even RDF. We also discuss the underlying entity framework that makes it easy to model, publish, and program against your data over the Web.

Rapidly Building Data Driven Web Pages with Dynamic ADO.NET
Speaker(s): Samuel Druker – Microsoft, Shyam Pather – Microsoft
Audience(s): Developer
Come learn about how new technologies from Microsoft bring together the concepts of dynamic languages and ADO.NET and allow you to quickly develop data driven Web pages using ASP.NET dynamic data controls, scalable to even the most complex databases.

*note that Andrew Conrad wants to make sure you notice the word DYNAMIC in that session!

Deep Dive on Data Driven Experiences
Speaker(s): Aaron Dunnington – Microsoft, Tim Scudder – Microsoft
Audience(s): Developer
Come learn how technologies like Silverlight, Language INtegrated Query (LINQ), and SQL Server 2005 can help developers build impactful, dynamic applications that reach the broadest possible audience.

LABS

REST Services for Data Access over the Web
Audience(s): Developer
In this lab, build a data service accessible through REST that supports exchanging data in XML and JSON formats, with full query and update capabilities; and build an AJAX-based client and a managed code client.

Rapidly Building Data Driven Web Pages with Dynamic ADO.NET
Audience(s): Developer
In this lab, learn about Project Friday, an incubation effort in the ADO.NET team to enable quick, clean, and iterative development with instant results. Project Friday provides this functionality by leveraging the ADO.NET Entity Framework and the power of dynamic languages.

Danny Simmons (from ADO.NET team) talks about Entity Framework on DotNetRocks

Data Access

There are a lot of us who have been looking forward to this show being posted: Daniel Simmons on ADO.NET Entity Framework. Now I have to find some time this weekend to listen to it. Roger Jennings has a fantastic analysis of the show here. While at DevConnections, Richard and Carl were talking about how much fun this show was to do. They didn’t know anything about Entity Framerwork when they started and were definitely fascinated with it. I’m glad that more people are going to get exposed to EF!

Here is a link to Danny’s blog.

Anders Hejlsberg and Me (or is that I?) on LINQ in Redmond Developer News

Data Access

It’s not often that one sees their name right next to Anders‘ (especially considering that I’m a VB programmer :-)), but check out this LINQ article in the  current issue of Redmond Developer News. While the focus is Anders and this great technology he and others (and always with a nod to Alan Griver) are bringing to Visual Studio .NET, I was asked to give some developer perspective.

I’d also like to say that I wasn’t literally jumping up and down at PDC. 🙂

I know that I have had the same reaction when watching Scott Guthrie present on LINQ to SQL. I think I’m jumping up and down with joy, but truly my butt remained glued to the chair.

It was fun talking to Michael Schwarz about this, but I think I may have overwhelmed him with my geek technical perspective of LINQ from which he was trying to extract key points for dev managers. He seems to have done a great job.

Michael talked to another developer, VB guru Bill McCarthy who gave him a great analogy quoted at the end of the article.

LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework

Data Access

A recent LINQ forum question asked about the differences between Linq to SQL and the Entity Framework.

This is the response that I wrote and thought I would surface it in my blog:

 Besides that Linq to SQL is only for SQL () one of the big differences is that the EDM is more flexible and more loosely coupled because of the 3-tiered model (conceptual layer, source schema and the mapping layer in between).  For example, you could have one conceptual layer and then multiple mapping layers that point to mulitple databases. In LINQ to SQL, your dbml properties are tightly bound directly to one particular field in a table.

While these are not in the March 2007 CTP, EDM is getting the ability to build views of the conceptual layer as well as to write stored procedures in the mapping layer. These are really cool features. I don’t believe you can do this with Linq to SQL, but a) I could be mistaken and b) that may be something that is forthcoming.

In addition to Linq to Entities, Entity SQL can be used to query entities. This can be either through the object services API or the Entity CLient (the one which gives you connections/commands and results in a dbDataReader). Entity SQL, while not as elegant as using the strongly typed LINQ, has the advantage of enabling dynamic queries, since you use a string to build a query, much like TSQL.

Both Linq to SQL and EDM allow inheritance and extending the code generated class with addtional partial classes. EF allows many to many relationships. I believe that LINQ to SQL will NOT be getting this by RTM.

These are just a few points and hardly exhaustive. But to me they are the low hanging fruit.