I wish I could say I have downloaded it and already started playing with it, but alas, that would be akin to adding the big hatchet into my juggling act at the moment.
Here's a bit of info from Pablo Castro's blog post (well, Pablo's message, posted by Alex Barnett). I love seeing the many comments already on the post from so many excited data geeks!
This CTP includes a really broad set of features. The CTP documentation has a more detailed feature matrix, but here is a high-level summary of what you’ll find in this preview:
- The ADO.NET Entity Framework, which includes:
- The Entity Data Model (EDM), which allows developers to model data at a higher level of abstraction
- A powerful client-views/mapping engine to map to and from store schemas
- Full query support over EDM schemas using Entity SQL and LINQ
- An object services layer that allows you to choose to present query results as rows and columns or as objects. When using .NET objects, the system will transparently do identity resolution, change tracking and update processing for you.
- An open provider model that allows other stores to plug into the ADO.NET Entity Framework
- Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) integration in ADO.NET for this CTP includes:
- LINQ to Entities: formulate queries using LINQ against your EDM schemas
- LINQ to DataSet: the DataSet finally gets full query capabilities! You can formulate LINQ queries that go against one or more DataTable objects. The LINQ to DataSet implementation will even optimize certain query patterns for better execution performance.
- Tools
- We're working hard to include a rich set of tools that integrate naturally with the runtime components to provide a great end-to-end experience. Some early tools are included in this CTP, and more will come soon!
That darned billable work just gets in the way of all my fun sometimes! ;-)
You can get the goods here.