February 2008 Entries

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.