We've waited a good long while, but RTM is finally here for both the ADO.NET Entity Framework as well as ADO.NET Data Services! Both are now available as part of the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (tools and runtime) and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (for just the runtime without tools) releases that were announced this morning.

You can check out more information as well as the downloads at http://msdn.microsoft.com/data (keep checking back as I will continue updating content all week to reflect the releases) and check out my most recent MSDN articles on Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services for a bit more info.

Taking a page from the Astoria team... We're opening up the EF :)

Today really marked the beginning of our work on Entity Framework V2 and as part of that, we were able to extend the very successful transparent design process that we have been using for ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) to the Entity Framework team.

You can check out details of the process and learn more about how you can get involved and provide feedback in Tim Mallalieu's initial post, and of course you can check out all the upcoming design details at the New Entity Framework Design Blog .

Let us know what you think!

The most recent versions of the ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta and ADO.NET Data Services Beta are now available!

Both the Entity Framework and Data Services have now officially become part of the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 releases beginning with the Beta released this morning. These will also be the final Beta prior to the RTM of these two projects.

For more information on these releases and on changes that have been since the last public releases, check out the ADO.NET Team and Astoria Team blogs.

We all develop applications that in some way retrieve or manipulate data... and now there are so many different technologies to choose from!

Looking for a good place to find information on Data Development? I've been working with this great to new site to help them get content... The site is just getting started... but I have to say they've made a pretty good first go. In talking with the site managers, they've started with just two basic topics, ADO.NET and XML, but plan to continue to add more topics and new content as it becomes available. There are some great articles, links to articles, and tutorials to get you started.

Check it out and let them know what you think!

http://datadeveloper.net

What do these all have in common?

On Wednesday, David Treadwell posted to the Windows Live blog, giving a sneak peek into what you can expect to hear more about next week Mix08.

"At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.

In addition, these same protocols and the same services are now ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as “ Project Astoria”) compatible. This means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints, leveraging a large amount of existing knowledge and tooling shared with on-premise SQL deployments...."

For more on this and other ADO.NET Data Services news at Mix check out our three focused sessions:

Wed, March 5th - RESTful Data Services with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework by Pablo Castro

Fri, March 7th - Accessing Windows Live Services via AtomPub by Pablo Castro

Fri, March 7th - Building RESTful Real World Applications with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework by Mike Flasko

How great was the LA Launch kickoff event on Wednesday? It seemed to be a good time for those that got in. The sold out event began with Steve Ballmer's keynote at the Nokia Theater and continued through the day at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Most exciting for myself and the ADO.NET team, my Getting Started with the Entity Framework chalk talk saw more than a full room as people crowded the entrance to listen in.

For more information on the launch or a chance to check out the Virtual Launch, check out http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/default.mspx

This morning Microsoft made a pretty big announcement, and another step in the right direction. We announced that we would implement 4 new interoperability principles across many of our products including Vista and the .NET Framework, that will impact product development, documentation , and community outreach.

1. Ensuring open connections

2. Promoting data portability

3. Enhancing support for industry standards

4. Fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities

The last three, I believe will be of most interest to my team and the technologies we work on. As mentioned in the Microsoft press release, this announcement highlights the "significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing", and as the Data team, this is a big part of what we are working to enable.

Also in the press release, a number of specifics were highlighted to give example of how these principles would be implemented, including:

• Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. To promote and enable more interoperability between commercial and community-based open source technologies and Microsoft products, this initiative will provide resources, facilities and events, including labs, plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development.
• Expanding industry outreach and dialogue. An ongoing dialogue with customers, developers and open source communities will be created through an online Interoperability Forum. In addition, a Document Interoperability Initiative will be launched to address data exchange between widely deployed formats.

With the recently announced AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft, an open-sources dev tool, developers building World of Warcraft add-ons can get the Visual Studio experience without requiring any version of Visual Studio to be installed or licensed.  The developer environment makes use of the new free Visual Studio 2008 shell.

Included in the VS2008 Shell, is the XML Editor and XSLT Debugger which earn high praises from WoW developers on http://www.wowwiki.com/HOWTO:_Set_up_Visual_Studio_for_WoW_XML

It's Here!! The Entity Framework Beta 3 and Entity Framework Tools CTP 2 have released. Both of these releases now run on top of the Visual Studio 2008 RTM.

For more info... including breaking changes, features, etc. check out the ADO.NET Team blog post.

The first CTP of Microsoft's New SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is now available.

The PHP Driver will deliver an API designed-to-enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform.

For more on the CTP and the new SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP, check out the team's new blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlphp or www.microsoft.com/sql/php.

This morning at ZendCon, Bill Staples announced the upcoming availability of the first CTP of Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.

The PHP Driver will deliver an API designed-to-enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform.

For more on the announcement, check out the http://blogs.msdn.com/data or www.microsoft.com/sql/php.

A Beta 2 compatible version of Astoria is finally here! The Astoria team has just released a refresh of the Astoria Prototype CTP to work with Visual Studio Beta 2 and the Entity Framework Beta 2.

The Astoria September 2007 CTP is available here.

For more information, you can check out the announcement on the Astoria Team Blog.

Today, the ADO.NET team announced the release of the long awaited Entity Framework Beta 2 and the NEW Entity Framework Tools CTP1.

More information about both releases, and the features that have been included and/or improved for this release, is available on the ADO.NET Team Blog.

New name... Same blog...

I'm married! It was great... we took a couple of weeks off and drove up to Regina where we held the somewhat small ceremony on June 30th, and had a great time. Great vacation, tonnes of family... but it's good to be back home :)