ADO.NET vNext - feedback so far
(this post was originally posted here )
Since announcing our ADO.NET vNext plans at TechEd
last week, the team has been on the lookout for your
feedback on where we heading with the next release.
This post is a round up of some of the
comments / feedback we've heard. It's certainly not
all of it, but should give you a flavor of what we
are hearing. Some of it positive, some if it less
so, but all very valuable...Lots of good questions
and clarification being asked for.
TechEd
Let's start with Andres
Aguiar. He sat through Dave Campbell's session
on Microsoft's
Data Platform Vision (I'll post a link to the
webcast once it's up. In the meantime,
Kent Tegels has some useful notes).
Andres enjoyed the Entity Framework news:
"It was a good session. I totally buy MS's
Data Vision. The most interesting stuff for me
is the Entity Framework. At last there will be a
conceptual data model that all MS products will
share (Reporting, Replication, Analysis
Services, ADO.NET). This is a big and important
improvement in the way we used data. The 'Data
Dude' tool looks cool. If they manage to
integrate it with the Entity Framework, it would
rock."
Pablo Castro, technical lead on ADO.NET also
presented at TechEd. He provided a talk called 'Next-generation
Data Access in .NET Applications with ADO.NET vNext'
(summarized
at DevX here, Kent's notes
here and Jason Coyne's notes
here). We had good face time with customers
giving us plenty of feedback after the talks. While
at TechEd, the team also had
meet up with a few ADO.NET
friends and
(Dave Sceppa and Pablo also presented 'Integrated
Innovation: Using ADO.NET 2.0 with SQL Server 2005'.
You can view the webcast
here - registration required)
This week
This week, Pablo followed up TechEd
with this post providing an outline of the
planned improvements with links to more detailed
documentation. He asked for more feedback - you've
been keeping us busy by providing lots of it on your
blogs and
Techworld covered the news too:
"Entities will help improve communication
between business people and developers, said Lyn
Robison, an analyst with the application
platforms group at the Burton Group. "It will
raise the level of abstraction so that you can
begin to think of data from a business
perspective, not just from a
rows-and-tables-in-a-database perspective,"
Robison said."
Some of the early feedback on the documents
included this post on
Ayende Rahien's blog on the topic of LINQ for
Entities, specifically: many-to-many relationships;
the extensibility of the data model; and Indexed and
Custom collections. You can read Pablo's response in
the
post's comments. Wagnerblog also had some
thoughts to share in the context of
ADO.NET Entities and ORMs. Tim Mallalieu (a PM
on the ADO.NET team) also blogged his thoughts
on Entities, sparking off some
A recurring theme of some of the feedback is
summed up by
"OK, it actually happened. We'll have two
mapping technologies in .NET v.next. LinQ for SQL, previously known as DLinQ is the
'simple' mapping technology. LinQ for Entities, will be on top of the new
ADO.NET Entity Framework, and will be the
'complex' (we could say 'real') mapping
technology. Now, does this make sense? How will someone
decide to use one or the other?"
"Oh joy! Three ORM frameworks. Linq
to SQL, Linq to DataSet, Linq to Entities."
This was echoed
by David Hayden and
others. Clearly we have work to do in this area
- this point was acknowledged by Somasegar (VP of
Microsoft's Developer Division) where he blogged
this week
about LINQ and ADO.NET Entities:
"Our teams are busy working on the next
version of Visual Studio and incorporating these
technologies in a consolidated way to ensure the
very best experience for our developers."
Another common question we heard was about the
ADO.NET vNext CTP and its timing.
In this Forum post by Lance Olson, the ADO.NET
Group PM, he provides an August 2006 target date.
This was later
blogged by Erwyn Van Der Meer and
Alex
at Base4 after the team confirmed it.
Getting more into developer experience, Shyam
posted up a 'great'
screencast
showing ADO.NET vNext in action, again prompting
yet more feedback and questions.
More feedback
As we move toward the CTP later this year, we
want to make sure we have a systematic, scalable
process around capturing your feedback (Bugs,
Suggestions and Other) on the bits we release. We
also want to provide you with status on these as the
product development goes on. We'll be using the
Microsoft
Connect platform developed for beta programs at
Microsoft (IE
is one of the many teams using it). Using
Connect, the feedback provided goes directly into
our team's bug tracking and development systems. It
has recently been upgraded to
replace the Product Feedback Center (Ladybug).
Look out for more info with respect to ADO.NET vNext
later in the year.
In the meantime, keep the feedback coming!
Oh, and don't forget to check out the
new Data blog.
If you want to get your thoughts heard by Sam
Druker, Product Unit Manager (PUM) for Microsoft's
Data Programmability team,
then this is the place to do it.
Thanks!
Alex Barnett, Community PM