LINQ, ADO.NET and Entities
In case you missed it, Somasegar (Microsoft's VP of Developer Division) blogged today about some of the LINQ and ADO.NET innovations planned for the next version of Visual Studio (Orcas).
It's getting some attention already...
"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."
PCWorld covers this too.
Then Sam Druker opened up a new team blog - blogs.msdn.com/data introducing the Data Programmability (DP) team, its charter and a bunch of links to other team blogs, MSDN Dev Centers and Channel 9 videos.
As Sam points out, the team has been hard at work delivering a whole bunch of stuff and is gearing up to deliver a whole bunch more. Right now, the attention is on LINQ (see Mike Champion's post), ADO.NET and Entities and based on the some of the documentation made recently available as well as the May LINQ CTP, the teams are getting a load of valuable feedback. Later this week I'll post a round-up post with pointers to some of the feedback we are hearing with respect to ADO.NET vNext over at the ADO.NET blog.
I'm a big believer in the power of 'showing' stuff. I think screencasts are a great way of communicating a lot of information and concepts and can make it an easier exercise to to grokk stuff, rather that wading through a pages and pages of written word. (If a picture tells a thousand words, a five minute screencast at 10 frames / pictures a second is, er, a lot of words). Of course, everyone's got their own grokking styles. I do my fair share of reading, but personally, I'm visually inclined - I really like to see what the 'idea' is all about and how it can be done. Show me screens and scenarios.
So I was delighted to pass by Shyam Pather's office the other day and see this note stuck on the front of his Office door:
Blinds down, headphones on and mike in place. Luuuvly. Several takes and a few edits later, Shyam (dev lead for ADO.NET vNext) has posted his first screencast showing the developer experience of using some of the features on code. If you develop data-based application (who doesn't?) it's well worth checking out what all the fuss is about.