Items of Interest: Sample Oracle Provider, Transparent Design Process

Just a quick note to make sure people are aware of a couple interesting events from the last day or two. 

First, one of my colleagues, Jarek, posted our Sample Oracle Provider for the EF.  I should stress that this is a sample not an official supported Oracle provider from Microsoft, but it is designed to help provider writers learn more about building providers for the EF, as well as to highlight some of the particular challenges encountered in briding between the EF's view of the world and that of Oracle, to fully demonstrate the provider-agnostic nature of the EF, etc.

Secondly, I'm excited to let you know that today we launched the new EF transparent design process.  Over the last year or two as we were building the first version of the EF, we were fortunate to have a lot of great feedback from folks both inside and outside of Microsoft, and within the constraints of a large, logistically challenging first release, we did our best to react to that feedback and made a number of changes--some of which have seen the light of day in v1 and some which have begun but won't complete until v2 or later.  It has become very clear, however, that we need to do a lot more to gather that feedback earlier in the process and improve our ability to react to it.  One of the first steps in that direction was the creation of the advisory council.  It's my hope that the new design process will be a further positive move along that path.  As more details emerge, please let us know what you think.

- Danny