191 Miles to Astoria

A couple of months ago I became Development Lead for Project Astoria.   The goal of Project Astoria is to provide a data services for the web. AKA Project Astoria provides a RESTFUL head for any sort of "queryable" data, for example data stored in relational databases.  It also contains a O/R style client library (usable via a standard .Net or Silverlight client) with Linq support for accessing the Astoria Data Services.  For a much more in depth description of the project, check out the project overview document.

Over the last few months, the team has moved from prototype mode to working on the production code.  In an effort to elicit quicker feedback on our design, we have started publishing our design notes on the Astoria Team Blog.  Normally our design team meets twice a week for a couple of hours, so we expect to be able to publish these notes fairly regularly.  In most cases, we are going to be right in the middle of coding and testing the features described in the design notes when the notes are published.   Hence, based on feedback from the developer community we will change the design and implementation mid flight. 

Pablo has already published the first set of design notes on the Payload Formats.  Later this month we should have notes on the URI format and the service extensibility.

We are also looking to hire a few people in anyone is interested.  See here for more information or send me your resume directly to me if interested.