Saturday, February 2, 2008

ADO Entities - The new beginning....

 

As a developer you are (most likely and definitely hopefully) eager to use tools that will get you recognized as the one who stands out from the typical developer.  You strive to be better at what you do by following known, well defined and proven patterns. You reach for the tools to make your solutions more predictable.

This was relatively easy in most of the facets of application development, until it came to changing schemas and other database related areas.  You have stared the DBA's in the eye and at some points prayed that the changes they are making would not cause you undergo a full rewrite or a substantial tear-down of your application.

While you hoped and prayed, ADO.NET team has listened to your prayers and released a very slick framework called ADO Entities and an ADO Entity Designer (aka Astoria). 

This is truly a new and very nice beginning.  Imagine the new world where:

  • DB Schema can be exposed as objects
  • those objects are actually defined as a Model to your application and not just straight schema map
  • those objects can span (use multiple tables to store/read info)
  • or tables can be merged into a single object
  • objects collections can be used in a JOIN and other LINQ related operations
  • lazy load and concurency  is no longer your issue
  • compiler will let you know if the column name exists
  • you no longer have a need to write or maintain complex DAO layers

Well,  that world is here now...

Currently in Beta 3 this is a nice set of tools to be adding to your developer toolbox. 

Join the excitement and start exploring the new and wonderful world of ADO Entities.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=15DB9989-1621-444D-9B18-D1A04A21B519&displaylang=en

 

Enjoy and be sure to let me know what you think....

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