Although I was not yet at TechEd when Pablo Castro gave his takl on ADO.NET 3.0, I was fortunate enough to attend an event today that had something of a repeat performance. The two big things that are coming in ADO.NET are built in ORM and the impact of LINQ's total integration into .NET.
I've never used ORM before so definitely found the Entity stuff really interesting. Especially with contexts that will be able to participate in SOA. The DBAs in the room were pretty freaked out to see it not just an add-on, but 100% available to developers. For those of you also new to ORM, what this goo does is give us the ability to map out views in the .NET IDE. Then we can build queries using the strong typing that the views make available to us. these queries are created using MapConnection, MapCommand and other classes that I'm assuming inherit from dbCommand. The queries are very similar to T-SQL, but have added power.
Bringing the control of creating ad-hoc views outside of the database to the developers is very powerful, though if changes happen on the database end that are not carried through into the client side schemas, problems will erupt - which is what makes the dbas unhappy. There was a hint that the Database Developer SKU of VSTS might eventually provide the answer to some of these concerns.
My take on this is that Microsoft is putting more arrows in our quiver to choose from when doing our work. The important thing will be for people to understand the differences, the pros and cons and make informed choices about which way to go. This is nothing new. The real beauty is that this will live side by side with the existing ADO.NET data APIs that we know and love.
Then there is LINQ which, as a former FoxPro developer, I just love love love. As someone who has spent a lot of time investigating the new power of ADO.NET and what it means to caching data, the ability to query that data beyond DataTable.Select is a dream come true. What's extra cool about LINQ is that the results of a query can be dumped out, not only to data objects, but to the new entity objects.
The ADO.NET team is still in the early stages of dreaming about and molding these new tools so there will be more to come. For the time being, they have now released a video on Channel 9 . Pablo said there are whitepapers but I can't find the links and will post them here when I do and here they are.: ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview and Next Generation Data Access
One of the extras about this great event put on by DataDirect was that I got to meet one of my data access heros: Bob Beauchemin. :-)
Bob Beauchemin and Pablo Castro
Me and Bob Beauchemin
