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