MS ADO .Net Data Service

Microsoft is clearly going in the right direction with the project formerly known as Astoria, now officially ADO .Net Data Services and with the Entity Framework.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/default.aspx (the Astoria project team blog)

Even if they never liked it in the past (see the ObjectSpaces story) they will follow the path to mapping technologies, because that's the best way to implement MDA.

The problem is to guess when these technologies will be:

1. Really usable (today it is just a beta).


2. All components will be really integrated, end-to-end: LinQ -> Entities -> ADO .Net.


3. Usable outside the Microsoft environment, at least for the supported data sources, e.g. not limited to SQL Server.


4. At the end, it will ne nice to understand when a consistent and comprehensive solutions will be available. During some quarters (years?), Microsoft customers will still have to mix various technologies and will have to decide which of the several approaches available will perform the best for them.

In the meantime .Net programmers can already try Xcalia SDO / DAS for .Net. They will be able to use LinQ to query against its logical business model and perform an efficient mapping with all the data sources XIC supports: RDBMS, XML, Web Services, mainframe transactions, packaged applications, components, etc.